A few months ago a requirement came up in the Land Rover Project to move from Paypal Website Payments Pro (UK) to using Protx.
Both of these systems enable you to take online payments directly from customers’ credit cards, but what’s the difference?
Well Paypal was a great early choice for us. L. R. Series already had a very strong eBay presence as so used Paypal heavily already. They were familiar with the Paypal admin systems and given that their own website was about to be launched there was merit in easing that transition by not changing everything all at once.
Additionally Paypal have one great feature: they don’t require that you have a merchant account. Paypal act as the merchant on your behalf. This was necessary for the Land Rover people because as a new startup they would have been unlikely to get merchant status from their bank.
So Paypal have a lot of positives. The downside to Paypal is that they charge for the privilege of them being your merchant; don’t support Verified by Visa nor Mastercard Securecode and so leave you much more susceptible to chargebacks; we also found that CVV/CV2 failures weren’t being rejected or flagged up clearly in the administration panel.
Enter protx.
To use protx you must have a merchant account – you need to contact your bank and jump through a few hoops so that they can satisfy themselves that you are merchant-worthy.
Once you have this then you can sign up to Protx and let them handle the payment for you.
The best features we found with Protx when compared with Paypal are, in no particular order:
- Reduced transaction fees
- Quicker to get money from them into your account
- Better security – e.g. VBV and MSC are supported; the admin panel is awash with traffic lights about the security of the transaction; you can add more policies to determine which transactions are rejected immediately.
- Great customer service
All handy experience to get just before starting with Ebuyer.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:18 am
So which is better — Protx VPS Server or Protx VPS Form? My partner and I cannot decide. Both do about the same thing. One has more hoops than the other and yet doesn’t seem to offer any extra benefits? We emailed tech support and haven’t gotten an answer.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Neither is better per sé as they do slightly different things – so it depends on your requirements.
The key difference, as I understand it, is that with VPS Form the entire shopping basket, card capture and reporting is done on protx.com. So your customer won’t be on yourwebsite.com – they will be on protx.com. You won’t handle reporting for your accounts on your own website – you will use Protx’s admin pages.
You should choose VPS Form if you need something which is fast to integrate (i.e. zero development time) or you don’t have a database or ability to install SSL on your web server.
With VPS Server you can hold all the basket/order information and just redirect the customer to protx.com for the payment capture part.
We have been using VPS Direct which allows us to host everything on our website and capture payments with Protx transparently.
Please let me know if you find out differently – having never used Form/Server this is just based on my understanding.
Good luck with your project!