Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Ecommerce Hosting & Discussion : Paypal Payflow Pro vs. Authorize.net?

[innov8tion]

To anyone with experience with these systems, what would you recommend? Payflow Pro (now by Paypal, formerly by Verisign) is newer and available directly from Paypal; Authorize.net is obviously the 800 lb. gorilla. Has anyone here used Payflow Pro for a site of 2000+ orders per month? Any opinions? Thanks in advance for any assistance.

// innov8

[Formpay]

In all honesty, for what you will be using it for (im assuming web hosting) they are the same thing. As long as your billing system or shopping cart accepts them, you wont know a difference on the gateway side of things.

If you do decide to go with the Payflow Pro i would recommend getting your merchant account with paypal. If you don't, you will be paying $0.10 per sale attempt. And if your looking to go with Authorize.net. Be sure to check and make sure your not paying a $0.10 Authoriz.net per transaction fee. A lot of companies still charge this, A lot do not. But with 2000 transactions per month, Thats going to cost you an extra $200 per month.

[Engelmacher]

The design behind Authorize.net's API makes more sense to me and I'd rather not give PayPal any money so the choice is a simple one for me. In terms of day-to-day usage once you're up and running I doubt you'll notice much difference.

[cdgcommerce]

Both will do the same thing at the end of the day. Given the choice, I would personally prefer Authorize.Net OR a gateway with an Authorize.Net emulation mode over Payflow Pro.

As far as transaction cost goes, there are also gateway options that have no transaction or monthly costs at all. As Formpay mentions, .$10 x 2000 = $200 per month in extra cost so if you can avoid that, all the better.

Other aspects to look into for a gateway is whether there are additional costs to use value-added features like Verified by Visa/MasterCard SecureCode and other fraud scrubbing technologies.

Sometimes these are included free but usually there are costs associated with all of them and so to make an apples to apples comparison you'll want to consider that too.

[innov8tion]

How is Payflow Pro's back end system? Is their fraud-prevention system better (or more feature rich) than Authorize.net?

// innov8

[Corey Bryant]

Payflow offers more features on the backend - and charges accordingly for those features. Payflow will give you about 1,000 free transactions via their gateway, but other gateways might only charge a monthly fee which is sometimes better when it comes to having thousands of transactions a month.

Plus you might be able to get the transaction costs reduced some as well with numerous transactions.

[wbpro]

I recommend Authorize.net always, we have developed a few hundred ecommerce sites with different gateways and Authorize.net so far has been the best one we have worked with.

[roaddemon]

I used Payflow pro from verisign/paypal for 6 years at a fairly major ecommerce shop. We did thousands of transactions a week and over $100,000,000 / year and had very few problems. I'm exploring payment processors at my new company and would prefer to avoid dealing with Paypal, but I can't find another processor that does "reference transactions". Reference transactions are when you process a transaction on a customer's credit card once, then future transactions can use the original transaction ID instead of the credit card number (from a customer's perspective, it looks like you're saving their cc info, but you don't open yourself to the risk of having credit card data stolen). The absence of this feature is a deal breaker for me, so I'm stuck with Payflow Pro.

rd

[Corey Bryant]

How long do you need this pre-authorization? Pre-auths are usually 3-5 business days depending on the issuing bank, but you can usually re-do the transaction via the virtual terminal using the order ID.

The difference basically is that the money is not guaranteed yours as in the pre-auths / post-auths.

[cdgcommerce]

Hi Roaddemon,

If my understanding of what you are asking is correct, you are basically talking about doing a re-submit against a previous transaction.

If that is the case - there are a number of gateways that will support that. Authorize.Net will support that in the manual/virtual terminal side and other gateways will support that on the API side as well.

BTW, as a sidenote - in actuality, the gateway IS storing credit card details on a re-submit as that information is needed to process the new authorization code for the 2nd and all subsequent transactions.

[tollfree]

Paypal flow supports reference transactions and does wonders with it.

We have been using it lately to do recurring transactions as we have more freedom now.

Downside, its valid only for one year.

[IH-Rameen]

Originally Posted by tollfree

Downside, its valid only for one year.

Could you elaborate on what is available for one year? I have been using PayPal Pro, and very much like all the features it provides, but to do recurring, I was going to add Payflow..

[subpixel]

My merchant account is from Total Merchant Solutions and we use Authorize.net - Authorize.net charges us $0.10 per transaction above and beyond the fees from TMS. If there's a way I can avoid those fees, please let me know.

[avocado]

We have clients using both. Their APIs are actually fairly equivalent for one-time transactions. However, Payflow's recurring billing API blows Authorize.Net's horribly crippled implementation out of the water.

Also keep in mind that Authorize.Net (at least according to the rep I spoke to) offers only USD transactions. Payflow can offer accounts in multiple currencies, although you may need a separate Payflow account for each currency.

Payflow also allows you to integrate Paypal transactions directly into your site, which is nice in some cases.

If you do get the merchant account via Paypal, be aware that if you need to be able to take transactions larger than something like $3500 per transaction, you'll have to jump through hoops to get them to upgrade your account; if you attach your own merchant account, then the restriction is whatever restriction your bank sets -- just as with Authorize.

Payflow used to require that you install a binary on your webserver, but they've recently begun promoting a newer API that doesn't require anything to be installed.

Oh, one last note: Payflow allows more customization of automated receipts sent to users for transactions (again, particularly important for recurring transactions).

[Bot]

Originally Posted by roaddemon

I used Payflow pro from verisign/paypal for 6 years at a fairly major ecommerce shop. We did thousands of transactions a week and over $100,000,000 / year and had very few problems. I'm exploring payment processors at my new company and would prefer to avoid dealing with Paypal, but I can't find another processor that does "reference transactions". Reference transactions are when you process a transaction on a customer's credit card once, then future transactions can use the original transaction ID instead of the credit card number (from a customer's perspective, it looks like you're saving their cc info, but you don't open yourself to the risk of having credit card data stolen). The absence of this feature is a deal breaker for me, so I'm stuck with Payflow Pro.

rd

I don't understand: you made over $100,000,000 with Paypal Pro without big problem and you still want to leave Paypal

Why do you want to leave if you're happy and make a lot of money please?