PayPal Web Payments Pro vs Payflow Gateway

Hi, I don't get the difference between PayPal options!

My client wants all of the checkout stuff to happen on our website and to never show PayPal (unless they choose to checkout with it). Is that Web Payments Pro or Payflow Gateway?

If the answer is both -- what's the difference?

Thanks,
Amanda

The answer is indeed both.

The difference has to do with who will be processing your credit card transactions and actually capturing the funds. This is called a merchant account. With Payments Pro, Paypal is your merchant account and will take the percentage and transaction fees. With Payflow, you have your own merchant account (usually through a bank) and the bank takes your transaction fees and percentages, with Paypal only getting a fixed transaction fee on top of that (usually $0.10 per transaction). Payflow has a higher monthly fee as well. If you're doing a low volume of transactions (less than $10k/mo), I would go the WPP route.

As far as seeing that it's Paypal doing it, neither will show that. Both use an API to do the transaction so that means you write the code to get the customer data and you do an API call behind the scenes to get the money and complete the transaction. For credit card transactions, the customer will never leave your site.

There is one other caveat you need to be aware of. If you opt for WPP then you must integrate both branches of checkout. WPP has Direct Checkout (credit cards) and Express Checkout (where you log into a Paypal account). Paypal strictly enforces that rule and will cancel your WPP account if they find you've left out Express Checkout. Honestly, you'll probably want to offer EC anyways (even if you go Payflow) since adding a second payment option increases conversions.

That was incredibly helpful.