PayPal Shopping Cart: Start Accepting PayPal Payments with PayKickstart

For a small business owner working online, payment processing is probably one of the top priorities.

It can be quite overwhelming: All those numbers, merchant accounts, paperwork submission and approval process may be quite intimidating.

If you’ve researched the question at all, PayPal has probably come up more than once.

PayPal is one of the most obvious options for online payment processing, with over 100 million active accounts in nearly 190 countries.

PayPal’s idea is simple: using encryption to allow people to virtually send transactions between computers and accounts. When PayPal started back in 1998, it was quite an innovative and forward-thinking idea.

This has helped transform PayPal into one of the world’s primary payment processors.

Pros of PayPal Shopping Cart

PayPal offers a way to allow your business to accept secure payments on a trusted and well-known payment platform. Additionally, PayPal helps you sell internationally, allowing purchases in more than 100 different currencies.

• User-adoption and convenience. Due to how widespread the service is, many of your customers may already have an account. Once you have PayPal payment processing integrated, these clients will not have to type in their credit card details (which many people are weary of doing). They can simply login and send you the payment right away. For many of your customers PayPal may be the standard alternative to a credit card payment.
• Approval ease. There’s no paperwork. You don’t need a business entity. All you need is to register an account, and off you go almost immediately. Furthermore, you also don’t need to create a merchant account to be able to accept payments.
• PayPal users’ information exchange: With so many years on the market, each of its integration issues has been discussed online on multiple forums. You can now find solutions to almost any PayPal problem. No other payment processor has such a vast community coverage.
• PayPal allows you to create and send invoices directly from your account.
• You can set up recurring payments which makes running a subscription business easy (Not a perfect process though, unless you use a solid integration solution or one of the available WordPress plugins)
• PayPal offers a virtual terminal feature: at $30 a month, you can process credit card orders over the phone, in person and through the mail
• PayPal Credit (formerly “Bill Me Later“) lets your customers access PayPal funding (No Interest if it’s paid in full within 6 months on purchases of $99 or more). In essence, your customers pay over time, while you get paid in full right away. This is quite unique to PayPal. Inside PayKickstart, you can easily enable PayPal Credit option for your customers.
• PayPal fees are quite reasonable: the fees are currently at 2.9% + .30 for credit and debit card purchases.

How Much Does PayPal Cost Per Month?

Here’s a short list of PayPal fees that you’ll be looking at if you go with PayPal:

• Web payment processing within the United States costs 2.9% +$.30 per transaction
• International payments are 4.4% per transaction plus a fixed fee based on currency received
• There’s a $20 fee for chargebacks
• *Swiped mobile and in-store transactions cost 2.7% per transaction
• *In-store keyed (i.e. manually entered) payments cost 3.5% + $.15 per transaction
• *Virtual terminal transactions cost 3.1% + $.30 per transaction

*These are features that are available only if you upgrade your standard PayPal account to PayPal Payment Pro Plan which is an additional $30 fee a month.

PayPal Limitations

• Seller’s Protection offered by PayPal doesn’t cover digital goods.
• Chargebacks accrue large fees.
• PayPal has vague Terms of Use. This allows them to to suspend accounts at any point.
• PayPal subscription payment management is a bit of a nightmare. I spend hours trying to locate the payment and the payment profile. On the bright side, by using PayKickstart you can make recurring payment manager much easier.
• PayPal usability needs some work. Yes, they have been working on redesigning the seller’s dashboard but I think it has become even worse. Some links and options are impossible to locate, so I have to Google each time I am struggling to find anything. From my searching, I’ve seen that lots of people have the same issue
• PayPal business dashboard usability is not the only thing PayPal needs to work on. You’ll find many of their front-end options (payment forms and buttons) quite outdated and clumsy.
• PayPal can be unbelievably clumsy and non-cooperative when it comes to integration. Expect quite a few calls to customer support and long developer’s hours before you can see it working.

Despite the limitations, PayPal is still almost a must for small businesses or freelancers willing to increase their sales.

Luckily PayKickstart solves most of PayPal shopping cart integration and checkout process issues by using PayPal’s brand-new custom solution:

PayPal Payment Gateway Integration with PayKickstart

PayKickstart allows you to overcome PayPal integration nightmare with its PayPal easy integration process:

• Go to your Integrations section inside PayKickstart
• Click “Payment” tab and there click “Add a payment gateway” button
• Select PayPal(Beta) option from the drop-down
• Create an account name for display purposes.
• Select the base currency
• Select Connect to be taken to PayPal to finish the integration connection.
• Enable PayPal for campaigns where you want to include PayPal as a payment option

Read more on PayPal integration process

You are done integrating PayPal with your shopping cart! You can now use PayKickstart checkout design templates and popup widgets to accept online payments via PayPal:

With PayKickstart integration, customers won’t have to leave your shopping cart to pay via PayPal’s clumsy payment wizard. Instead, they will be able use PayPal popup widget to quickly complete the payment:

On top of that, with PayKickstart integration, your customers won’t have to type in payment details again as you will be able to charge them using the details they once input. This is a true one-click upsell.

Easier PayPal Recurring Payment Management with PayKickstart

PayKickstart makes recurring payment management much easier, no matter which payment processor you are using.

PayKickstart Subscription Saver feature helps you recover your customers’ failed recurring payments by sending three emails to the customer before canceling the payment:

• Immediately after the failed rebill attempt,
• 3 days after,
• 5 days after

Furthermore, with PayKickstart integration, you can easily update your customers’ subscription details to upgrade their current subscription:

There are also no more subscription limits which means you won’t have to ask your customer to agree to a new billing agreement every 2 or 5 years. Now those subscriptions will never expire until your customer chooses to cancel.

How to Enable PayPal Credit on Checkout Pages, Widgets & Form Embeds

Giving an option to pay with PayPal Credit is a nice way to convert those customers that don’t have enough funds available at this very moment.

With PayKickstart you can easily add PayPal Credit option to your checkout process:

• Follow the above integration steps
• In the specific Products Settings, enable “PayPal Credit”

Once that is enabled, that product buyer will see PayPal credit option if they choose the PayPal payment option:

Read more detailed instructions here: Enabling PayPal Credit on Checkout Pages, Widgets & Form Embeds

How PayKickstart’s PayPal Payment Integration Helps You Up Your Conversions

At PayKickstart we do our best to help your customers successfully complete their purchase and become your return buyer. There are some powerful features helping you to improve your conversion rate.

To sum up, here are a few powerful conversion optimization features you’ll find with PayPal integration inside PayKickstart:

• Saving your customers’ payment details for them to easily buy again
• Giving your customer an option to pay with PayPal Credit, in case they don’t have available funds at the moment
• Letting your customers pay on your site, without ever leaving to PayPal
• Giving an option to upgrade them to the next subscription level easily
• Saving failed payments: 5-10 minutes AFTER a new customer’s payment fails, PayKickstart will send out a “Payment Failed: Pending Order” email to ask them to try again and complete the order.
• Saving failed subscription payments: A sequence of emails will be sent to your customer urging them to update their payment information

PayPal Payment Processing FAQ

What does it mean when a payment is on hold in PayPal?

This is one of the most frequent questions when it comes to processing payments with PayPal. The scope of possible reasons is quite long and from Internet research, it sounds like PayPal can give any reason for putting funds on hold, including:

• Your PayPal account was inactive for a while (we are not told for how long exactly)
• The payment you received seems unusual for your selling pattern (again, this one is quite vague)
• “You’re selling an item that can potentially cause dissatisfaction with customers” (again, what exactly does this mean?)

Are PayPal funds available immediately?

• New PayPal accounts will see a 21-day hold on the availability of their earned funds
• Calling PayPal and going through some additional verification process may speed up the process
• Once your new-account hold is released, your funds are available immediately inside your PayPal account and it takes about a day to transfer them to your bank account

So Is PayPal Shopping Cart Worth a Try?

Overall, with all the limitations and issues in mind, PayPal shopping cart is still a good idea as an additional payment option. Remember many of your customers have and use their PayPal accounts often: Giving them a PayPal option means converting those customers easier.

At the very least test it out for a few months and see if it helps with your conversion rates. There’s no fee for setting up or canceling PayPal merchant account, so it’s easy and free to experiment with. And with PayKickstart integration, PayPal shopping cart is very easy to create.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

Read More About Ann Smarty