PayPal Business Account Review

PayPal supports the following payment methods:

• PayPal digital payments
• Credit and debit cards
• PayPal Credit
• Pay In 4
• Pay Monthly
• Pay With Venmo
• QR code transactions
• Apple Pay
• Bitcoin
• Etherium
• Litecoin
• Bitcoin Cash
• AliPay
• Bancontact
• Bancomat Pay
• BLIK
• EPS
• Finnish Online Bank Transfer (Verkkopankki)
• Giropay
• GrabPay
• iDEAL (the Netherlands only)
• MB Way (Portugal only)
• Mercado Pago (Mexico and Brazil only)
• Multibanco (Portugal only)
• MyBank
• PayU
• POLi (Australia and New Zealand only)
• Przelewy24
• Safetypay
• Satispay
• SOFORT
• Trustly
• Trustpay

As for currencies, PayPal supports 24 of them:

• Australian dollar
• Brazilian real
• Canadian dollar
• Czech koruna
• Danish krone
• Euro
• Hong Kong dollar
• Hungarian forint
• Israeli new shekel
• Japanese yen
• Malaysian ringgit
• Mexican peso
• New Taiwan dollar
• New Zealand dollar
• Norwegian krone
• Philippine peso
• Polish zloty
• UK pound
• Russian ruble
• Singapore dollar
• Swedish krona
• Swiss franc
• Thai baht
• US dollar

The Chinese yuan was formerly supported, but as of this update, it is no longer on PayPal’s list of supported currencies.

This is PayPal’s default means of accepting card payments. With Standard payments, you can offer PayPal’s standard payment options on your checkout page, so your buyers can pay with PayPal, debit and credit cards, Pay Later options, Venmo, and alternative payment methods.

Advanced payments give you the same payment options as Standard while also allowing you to customize your credit card fields. It’s also required if you want to enroll in Chargeback Protection, use the Virtual Terminal, and/or upgrade your payment plan to Payments Advanced or Payments Pro.

To use Advanced Credit & Debit Card Payments, you’ll need to specifically request it, supply PayPal with additional information about your business, and wait for approval.

You’ll get a lower credit/debit processing rate with Advanced card payments than with Standard card payments, and you now also have the option of opting into interchange-plus pricing. However, the rate you’ll ultimately pay will depend on whether you get Chargeback Protection and if you sign up for one of PayPal’s more advanced subscription plans, which we’ll describe below.

PayPal Checkout is an easy solution if you just want to add PayPal payment buttons to a website where you already accept credit cards or integrate with an eCommerce provider. To implement Checkout on your site, you may need a developer, but it won’t take a lot of work after that point. PayPal does the maintenance and upkeep for you. Plus, there’s no monthly fee.

Here’s what you get with PayPal Checkout:

• PCI Compliance: Because PayPal redirects customers to its site to complete the transactions, you don’t have to handle PCI compliance, as PayPal does that for you.
• Contextual Checkout Buttons: PayPal will use what it knows about your customers to display “smart” checkout buttons tailored to them. For example, Venmo users will see a Venmo checkout option. PayPal Credit will also appear as an option on eligible purchases.
• Localized Payment Methods: PayPal is in the process of adding localized payment methods for customers around the world. It’s already something we see with Stripe, so it’s not surprising to see PayPal implement it as well. In addition to existing support for SEPA Direct Debit (Germany), PayPal has added support for iDEAL (the Netherlands), EPS (Austria), Giropay (Germany), MyBank (Italy), and Bancontact (Belgium), and Mercado Pago (Brazil and Mexico), among others.

PayPal Payments Advanced (which does not refer to Advanced Payments as described earlier — yes, it’s complicated!) is more involved than PayPal Checkout as it gives sellers more control and customization with their payment process. Unlike PayPal Checkout, PayPal Payments Advanced will cost you $5/month.

Payments Advanced includes all the eCommerce integrations that PayPal Checkout offers but not the “smart” checkout buttons. Here’s what you do get, though:

• Hosted Checkout Page: If you’d rather keep your customers on your website throughout the checkout process, it’s worth looking at the Advanced plan. PayPal makes it easy for you to customize the design of your checkout. However, you do take some of the PCI burdens onto yourself in the process. PayPal makes it simpler with tools such as transparent redirects. At a minimum, you can expect to have to do self-assessments and quarterly scans to maintain your PCI compliance.
• Customizable Payment Buttons: With payment buttons, you can create an online shop where you can sell one item, or 10, or as many as you want. PayPal’s button builder tools allow you to customize the look of the buttons as well as how some aspects of the checkout process work (whether you want to go immediately to purchase or allow customers to add items to a cart). Nonprofits can also create donation buttons with the option to make one-time or recurring donations.

PayPal Payments Pro is for merchants who want complete control over the entire checkout process. PayPal Payments Pro is the most customizable of PayPal’s online payment processing options, though it will cost you an extra $30/month. Payments Pro’s main advantage over Payments Advanced is that Payments Pro gives you access to the virtual terminal, which you otherwise have to pay $30/month for as a standalone charge.

• Virtual Terminal: If you want to accept payments over the phone, PayPal’s virtual terminal will let you key in card numbers from a browser window. However, $30/month is a pretty hefty price for this feature, considering both Square and Shopify offer it at no additional charge.
• Recurring Billing: Technically, neither PayPal’s Payments Advanced nor its Payments Pro plan includes recurring billing. It’s an add-on service that costs an additional $10/month. In my opinion, that’s fairly expensive, given that Stripe offers much better pricing and more flexible tools in this regard. Note that you get recurring billing for no additional monthly charge with PayPal Checkout.

If you’re approved for Advanced credit/debit payments, you now have the option of enrolling in interchange-plus (PayPal refers to it as “Interchange Plus Plus”) pricing. Interchange-plus pricing is more complex than PayPal’s standard flat-rate pricing, but it ultimately works to the advantage of higher-volume merchants selling upwards of $5K to $10K per month. Furthermore, PayPal uses “gross settlement” when charging these fees:

• No fees are deducted from a payment at the time of transaction
• Once a month, PayPal invoices you for the accumulated processing fees for the month and auto-debits those fees from your chosen bank account

Thankfully, you can easily go into your account settings and turn off interchange-plus pricing and revert to flat-rate pricing if you find that interchange-plus pricing isn’t saving you money.

All merchants can apply to enroll in PayPal’s micropayments plan, though I’ve seen some reports of users being denied for it. This is particularly unfortunate for small-ticket merchants looking to mitigate the effects of the exceptionally high $0.49 per-transaction fixed fee. We’ll continue to follow the situation, but here is the micropayments rate that is still shown on PayPal’s official pricing page:

• Micropayments Rate: 4.99% + $0.09 per transaction

Qualified 501(c)(3) organizations that go through the verification process are eligible for a discount for online transactions:

• Nonprofit Discount Rate: 1.99% + $0.49 per transaction

PayPal doesn’t offer a nonprofit discount for in-person transactions. This nonprofit rate applies only to online sales or donations. Read our PayPal guide for nonprofits to learn more about what PayPal can offer for accepting donations.

If you’re not a nonprofit, you can still take online donations at a discounted rate, though your discount will be less significant:

• Donation Rate (if you’re not a nonprofit): 2.89% + $0.49 per transaction

This pay-as-you-go option costs $0.10 per transaction with no setup or monthly fees. With Payflow Link, you embed a checkout form on your website that will redirect to the PayPal site to complete the transaction. Payflow Link also adds PayPal and PayPal Credit buttons.

Payflow Pro costs $25/month, and there’s a relatively high $99 setup fee. Plus, you’ll still be paying the $0.10 per-transaction fee. The PayflowPro plan gets you a customizable checkout page that’s hosted on your website, with the ability to add PayPal and PayPal Credit options.

Formerly known as PayPal for Partners, the PayPal Commerce Platform is a payments solution that lets you sell on marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms, and other platforms for merchants and fundraising teams. With its vaulting feature, you can securely store your customers’ credit card data to streamline the checkout process. This feature, along with channel billing agreements, is available on an approval basis.

PayPal’s Zettle mobile processing app is not the most feature-laden POS around, but it’s a solid choice for smaller sellers. It features a more robust inventory system and card reader than PayPal’s previous mPOS system, PayPal Here (which has since been deprecated and is no longer operable).

The fact that your funds get deposited into your PayPal account along with the rest of your online sales is pretty nice. You don’t have to pay any subscription or software fees; you just pay the processing costs. Plus, the Zettle Reader 2 ($29 for the first reader, $79 for all subsequent readers) is a handy little mobile card reader. Pair it with your smartphone or tablet, and it accepts chip card and NFC/contactless payments. Unlike many inexpensive mobile card readers, the Zettle Reader 2 has a PIN pad and a display.

The PayPal Zettle Reader 2

More recently, PayPal introduced the all-in-one Zettle Terminal, a device that combines the payment acceptance of the Zettle Reader with a touchscreen that runs the POS natively, eliminating the need to pair it with a smartphone or tablet. The standard version costs $199 while a version with a built-in barcode scanner costs $239. Finally, terminal kits with a printer and dock start at $269.

The PayPal Zettle Terminal

If PayPal Zettle isn’t well-featured enough for you, you can integrate PayPal into one of the company’s partners for POS solutions. You’ll still pay for the software subscription, but PayPal charges nothing except the transaction fees and hardware. See the Integrations & Add-Ons section below for a closer look at your third-party integration options.

Consultants and contractors can use PayPal’s invoicing features to invoice their clients for the same rate as regular web transactions. PayPal’s invoicing tools are strong, allowing you to add a tipping option to the invoice and even set up installments. Recurring invoicing is supported as well. Both the lifecycle status and the payment/refund status of an invoice are tracked. You can also create custom billing apps with PayPal Invoicing APIs.

The Payflow gateway comes automatically bundled with PayPal’s online processing tools, so it’s not something many people will think about. However, your business can use PayPal’s gateway as a standalone product if you already have a credit card processor but want a new gateway. See the PayPal Merchant Services Fees & Rates section for pricing information (which doesn’t apply if you’re using PayPal to process payments).

PayPal’s “Marketing Solutions” bring to mind a pared-down Google Analytics with some PayPal tools thrown in. However, if most of your customers use PayPal, or you want to increase conversions on your site, it’s certainly worth looking at.

The Marketing Solutions package is available with all of PayPal’s online processing options, including Checkout, and is now available outside the US as well. “Shopper Insights” lie at the heart of this package. Knowing your sales conversion rates, average purchase size, and shopper device type will help you refine your business practices.

Want to pay employees or contractors via PayPal? The PayPal Payout feature allows you to send multiple payments at once rather than one at a time, using either a spreadsheet or the PayPal API. Plus, you’ll save money compared to PayPal’s standard rates. Check out the PayPal Merchant Services Fees & Rates section for more information.

PayPal sports a peer-to-peer payment tool in the form of PayPal.me. This app allows you to send and request payments to/from friends, family, customers, and clients. The other party doesn’t even need to have a PayPal account.

While personal payments do not incur any fees, commercial payments are charged the same 3.49% + $0.49 rate as payments made via PayPal proper. Be aware that PayPal is watching to ensure you don’t pass off commercial payments as personal payments. If you have a PayPal Business account, PayPal will assume any PayPal.me link associated with your account is commercial by nature and will charge you accordingly.

PayPal’s developer tools include PayPal Checkout for online sellers who opt not to implement an eCommerce integration. There’s also a White Label Wallet if you need a branded mobile wallet app that works at the point of purchase at in-person locations. Connect With PayPal is for merchants who want to allow customers to log into your website/app using their PayPal credentials. And finally, there’s the aforementioned PayPal Commerce Platform.

If you don’t have a website and would prefer to sell items through your existing social media channels, you can create embedded payment links and post them to your account on Facebook/Twitter/etc.

A separate feature, “Checkout on Facebook and Instagram,” allows you to sell products from your Instagram page while letting you use the full ecosystem of Instagram Shopping tools.

To compete with the likes of Klarna, PayPal has introduced two new pay later installment options, Pay in 4 and Pay Monthly.

Pay in 4 lets your customers pay for purchases in four interest-free payments, with one of those payments being a down payment due at the time of purchase and the remaining three payments being due every 15 days thereafter. Don’t worry — you’ll still get paid the entire amount upfront. Purchases qualifying for Pay in 4 must be between $30 and $600.

While Pay In 4 requires your customers to pay in four bi-weekly payments, Pay Monthly lets your customers spread out purchases over six, 12, or 24 months, with payment required on a — you guessed it — monthly basis. Purchases qualifying for Pay Monthly must be between $199 and $10,000.

Check out our post on PayPal Pay in 4 to learn more about both BNPL offerings.

When you create and use an online shipping label in PayPal, you’ll get access to USPS Commercial Base pricing along with UPS discounts — up to 45% off UPS Ground shipments and up to 55% off 2nd Day Air on eligible packages.

US users can now use PayPal to buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Furthermore, customers can now use crypto to pay for purchases from PayPal sellers. When a customer makes a purchase from your site using cryptocurrency, the crypto will be instantly converted to fiat currency, and the transaction will be settled like any other.

PayPal merchants can now use QR codes to accept payments from customers in-store. Just generate a QR code online or in the PayPal Business app, display it by your register, and let customers scan the code to make their payment. It’s a nice contactless payment option, particularly in an era of heightened germ awareness.

The PayPal Business Debit Mastercard gives you fast access to cash from your PayPal account — no waiting for a funds transfer.

You can spend your balance at any store that accepts cards or withdraw money from any ATM with a Mastercard, Maestro, or Cirrus acceptance mark. It also simplifies accounting because you don’t have to use your personal accounts to make business purchases or constantly shuffle funds around.

The PayPal Business Cashback Mastercard offers an unlimited 2% cash back on all purchases. There’s no annual fee and no foreign transaction fee, and you can get free cards for your employees. There’s also a consumer version of this credit card that offers 3% cash back when paying with PayPal at checkout (2% otherwise), but you won’t get free employee cards.

If you need a quick influx of cash and don’t want to deal with a loan, PayPal merchants are eligible to apply for PayPal Working Capital. It works like a merchant cash advance where you pay back the financed amount by deducting a small portion of each day’s transactions processed via PayPal.

Check out our PayPal Working Capital review for more details.

PayPal also offers a simple short-term loan service to merchants regardless of their payment processor. As we cover in our LoanBuilder review, you’ll need a credit score of at least 620, but the application process is pretty simple.

• Shopify
• X-Cart
• BigCommerce
• BigCartel
• Volusion
• WooCommerce
• Ecwid
• WordPress
• GoDaddy
• UltraCart

• Lightspeed
• Clover
• SalesVu
• Adobe
• Citcon
• Hike

• Xero
• QuickBooks
• Zoho
• Invoice2go
• Joist

• Etsy
• eBay
• Swappa
• Depop
• Whop

You’ll see countless negative comments in PayPal customer reviews, but there are plenty of positive comments from merchants (and even some developers). Considering tens of millions of merchants are using PayPal globally, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. Here’s a sample of positive chatter in PayPal for business reviews:

• Easy Setup: Most PayPal for business reviews — particularly from business owners — rave about how easy it is to set up a PayPal account.
• Widely Accepted: PayPal has an extensive user base, making it a trustworthy payment option for everyone. If you’re just getting your business off the ground, starting with something such as PayPal is a good choice. The name recognition and trust associated with PayPal (especially with its buyer protections) can be a serious asset in the early days of operation.
• Almost-Instant Access To Cash: Your PayPal transactions clear almost immediately, so you can spend the money in your account as soon as you have it — provided the place where you’re spending it accepts PayPal, of course. If you want your money anywhere, don’t overlook the PayPal Business Debit card. It works like a debit card, but it deducts directly from your PayPal account.
• Multiple Products/Services Under One Roof: PayPal offers you everything you need to process online or mobile payments (e.g., payment gateway, payment forms, virtual terminal, invoicing, micropayments, recurring billing, developer tools, etc.). It truly is a solution that will grow with you.
• Transparent Pricing: Every PayPal payment review notes that pricing-wise, what you see is what you get with PayPal. There are no setup fees, annual fees, cancellation fees, or downgrades for sellers.

PayPal is a global colossus with over 400 million users worldwide. Like all such big companies, it receives numerous complaints. The greatest difficulty with quantifying a negative PayPal account review is the fact that PayPal is also a consumer product. That means the vast majority of PayPal complaints come from consumers, not merchants.

I will say that the PayPal department handling BBB complaints is full of real people writing the responses and explaining where the problem occurred. If you go through the BBB, the odds are good that you can probably get whatever help you need — it just might take a little while, and you should try going through PayPal’s customer support first.

Overall, of the PayPal complaints coming from merchants, one single complaint predominates:

• Withheld Funds, Freezing Of Accounts, & Termination Of Accounts: If PayPal notes any suspicious behavior on your account, it may implement a hold on a certain percentage of your funds, freeze your account, or even terminate your account. Usually, a red flag on your account comes with a request for documents, such as bank statements, photocopies of your IDs, purchase orders, invoices, and more. PayPal uses that information to determine what to do with your account. One of PayPal’s criteria to flag an account is a sudden spike in processing volume. It also doesn’t like seeing merchants sell goods below cost (an unfortunate tactic used by a LOT of new eBay sellers) or merchants selling vague, mysterious products. Anything that indicates an unsustainable business model might be grounds for account termination.

That said, this isn’t a problem unique to PayPal. Other aggregators, including Square and Stripe, have a similar reputation. Such is the nature of the “come as you are” business model. Getting an account with minimal history is easy, but there’s an inherently higher risk because you’ll be under scrutiny once you get started. However, the lack of transparency in this process is the hardest part to defend.

In addition to the withheld-funds issue, here are some other common complaints found in many a PayPal business account review:

• High Transaction Fees: PayPal’s transaction fees are higher than a traditional merchant account. Visa’s wholesale rates for an eCommerce transaction are between 1.5% and 2.4% + $0.10 per transaction. At 3.49% plus $0.49 per PayPal Digital Payments transaction and 2.99% + $0.49 per Standard online credit/debit card transaction, PayPal’s rates are over that amount, even when you factor in a merchant service provider’s markup. However, merchant accounts aren’t always accessible or even viable for low-volume merchants. For those merchants, when you factor in the various costs that a merchant account often generates, PayPal usually breaks even or comes reasonably close. Plus, you don’t have a contract to worry about, and some PayPal merchants can now opt into interchange-plus pricing.
• Inconsistent Phone-Based Customer Service: Most merchants will rarely have to call PayPal’s customer service line. This is for the best. PayPal business account reviews often note that the quality of service on the helpline can be inconsistent. Some reps are more knowledgeable than others. The good thing is that PayPal has a whole slew of other service and support options (e.g., the knowledgebase, forum, email, etc.). Barring any account-related problems, chances are you can find your answer without having to call in.
• Chargebacks: Chargebacks are the bane of existence for any merchant who sells online. They’re also bad for your account stability, no matter what company you process with. A lot of chargeback-related complaints found in PayPal merchant reviews seem to come from sellers on eBay or merchants who aren’t happy with how a chargeback was resolved. PayPal does offer some limited seller protections for online transactions, but you should brush up on what is and is not covered (eBay sales, for example, aren’t covered).

Many of the complaints about PayPal posted to the BBB are ultimately resolved to the aggrieved party’s satisfaction.

Square is one of the best all-around payment processors you’ll find. In our Square vs PayPal comparison, we note that Square’s POS capabilities surpass those of PayPal by a good margin. Square offers both a basic free POS and a number of industry-specific POS options with both free and paid versions, along with greater POS functionality in terms of both hardware and software options. PayPal does offer a lower in-person processing rate, though.

As for online sales, Square doesn’t offer the international sales capabilities of PayPal, nor does it offer comparable multichannel sales support. If you need either of those things, PayPal has Square beat. However, most online merchants will save money with Square due to its (generally) lower online processing fees. Plus, Square offers its own eCommerce website builder for making your own online store, which PayPal does not. Finally, unlike PayPal, Square allows CBD sales, provided you are approved for the Square CBD program.

Stripe Payments is a long-time favorite of ours in the field of online payment processing. In the battle of Stripe vs PayPal, Stripe’s developer tools and APIs are second-to-none, making it ideal if you want a custom payments solution for your online business. Plus, Stripe’s online processing rate is the same as that of Square, so you’ll likely save on processing with Stripe over PayPal. Being such a powerful tool for online payments, Stripe may be overkill for small businesses that lack developer support, but businesses with complex online sales needs will likely prefer Stripe to PayPal.

As for in-person POS, Stripe is only just now catching up, and its brick-and-mortar sales capabilities lag behind those of PayPal.

So far, we’ve compared PayPal to two of our favorite third-party processors, but we also wanted to compare it to one of our favorite providers of full merchant accounts, Helcim. The primary advantage Helcim has of PayPal is that Helcim gives you the security and stability of a full merchant account. This means you’ll be considerably less likely to face an account hold or termination due to factors beyond your control. Due to this, Helcim’s strong online sales/recurring billing features, and the fact that Helcim’s interchange-plus pricing (which comes with volume discounts) is lower than PayPal’s flat-rate pricing or its interchange-plus pricing, larger online sellers, in particular, may prefer Helcim to PayPal.

POS-wise, it’s a closer call, as both Helcim and PayPal have strong, if not spectacular, in-person sales capabilities. However, Helcim still has an advantage here in terms of the processing rate — for higher-volume sellers, anyway. Occasional & low-volume sellers may prefer the easy simplicity of PayPal.

Yes. Setting up a PayPal business account is free, and you won’t pay anything until you start accepting payments. You’ll have to pay a monthly fee if you want advanced checkout options and/or a virtual terminal, though.

On the plus side, PayPal is very easy to set up and use, offers countless business features and integrations, offers a POS app and inexpensive POS equipment for in-person sales, and can be used either as your main online payment processor or as a supplementary payment method.

On the downside, PayPal’s processing fees are high, especially for online sellers with small average ticket sizes. You’ll also face the risk of having your funds withheld and/or your account terminated

1. Click on the “Sign Up” box in the top right corner of PayPal’s main page.
2. Select “Business” and provide the requested information about your business.
3. Enter the email address you’ll use with your business account.
4. Enter your PayPal business type.
5. Enter some basic business and personal information.
6. Enter some additional business and personal details.