PayPal payments Advanced vs PayPal Payments Pro

Question

I currently use Magento v1.7 and offer PayPal Payments Standard and Authorize.net on my site using a onepage checkout extension.

I would like to drop Authorize.net and take cards and PayPal payments through PayPal. I am not clear on the differences between PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal Payments Advanced.

It looks like PayPal Payments Advanced will take care of much of the PCI compliance stuff, but PayPal Payments Pro costs more. I am sure I am missing something important, but I have not found anywhere the important differences between the two. They both seem to keep the customer on my site and the customer doesn't know PayPal is handling the credit/debit card payments which is good.

Can anyone help explain these two options so I can make a knowledgeable decision? Thank you!

Answer 1

Here is a good comparison of the two: https://www.paypal-marketing.com/emarketing/partner/na/program/comparison_chart.html

In terms of PCI, with PayPal Advanced, the customer is actually inputting their card details on a PayPal hosted page embedded in your site, so it lessens your PCI requirements.

If you look at the pricing at: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-advanced

you'll see the bigest difference is with Pro, you get a virtual terminal to run card numbers manually, whereas with Advanced, you do not. Advanced is not a full featured gateway service like Pro. If you don't need a virtual terminal, Advanced is the way to go for simpler PCI requirements.