Question from a colleague: “I have both Drupal 6 sites (Ubercart) and Drupal 7 (Ubercart or Drupal Commerce) sites that need shopping cart integration. Do I need to have the PayPal $30 a month merchant account to integrate using the API? Or can I integrate with the “free” PayPal account?”
There’s two (or more) ways to integrate Paypal – Website Payments Standard and Website Payments Pro. The simpler option takes the user via Paypal to process the payment and is free to implement. The “white label” version where the user never leaves your site is paid.
Used Paypal with UC a few times and it’s always been easy to implement and hassle free. The Payments Standard does allow paying with a credit card but users can get confused and the conversion rate drops because they assume they need a Paypal account to pay (they do not, but the option to pay using a CC with no Paypal account is a bit hard to see).
If you expect a lot of people checking out who do not have Paypal or don’t understand the system (ie. non-technical users), and a 5-10% drop in conversions is greater than the monthly price of Payments Pro, then it’s worth upgrading to the Pro version. Also, if you’re going to be doing mid-$x,000+ a month in transactions then compare the cost of Paypal to the cost of a full authorize.net merchant account, as there’s a point where Paypal’s high fees make it cheaper to go with a traditional merchant account.
Original discussion (that people requested I write up as a blog post): http://groups.drupal.org/node/165544