TOPIC: PayPal for CC processing, vs. Authorize.net

Hi everybody, I am just wondering - if I am using a PayPal account to accept regular old PayPal payments, I can use it to accept credit cards from someone who doesn't have a PayPal account, right? If this is true, is there a reason I should also use a CC merchant account and authorize.net, in addition to PayPal? ??? I am just wondering if there is something I don't know about PayPal which makes processing credit cards through Authorize.net more desirable. I know years ago I was pretty skeptical about PayPal, as there were a lot of negative stories in the 'blogosphere' about people getting their accounts frozen, but that was a long time ago. I'm strictly doing local payments within the US, there is no need for any international capabilities in my situation. Thanks in advance for my education in this matter.

Hello murph - The main reason in my opinion for taking a direct credit card payment is the ease for the end user and the look of professionalism. It looks better and is easier for users to just take care of everything directly in your website rather than having to go out to PayPal for part of the transaction. Can people pay via PayPal even without an account? Yes. Are there some people that will refuse to use PayPal? Yes. Offering both will increase your online sales and users always like having options. There is of course an ongoing monthly cost to having your own merchant account as well as the cost of setting up a SSL certificate for your domain. The SSL is very cheap through someone like GoDaddy however. Like anything else in your business or organization though, you have to spend money to make money Also, you can usually get better transaction fee rates through a merchant account than you pay to PayPal, so you would be keeping more of the purchase amount. Hope this helps a little. Any other thoughts or opinions out there?

What about using PayPal's Merchant Processing services? Now they offer "Website Payments Pro", which looks to be the old Payflow Pro that was acquired along with Verisign... Can I use DTDonate with the PayPal Processing account?
-Mike

Mike - PayPal Pro is not yet supported for DT Donate. We have added it to our DT Register component, but hasn't made it to this one yet. We will add it, but it probably won't be the very near future.