PayPal Advanced Settings

So, I've got the newer PayPal Advanced account (instead of PayPal Pro). It's just $5 per month, so it's much cheaper (it's available only in the USA at the moment).

Anyway, in the Payments options in the admin panel, OC has not yet added PayPal Advanced as a payment method. So, I took a chance and enabled the existing PayPal Pro option and plugged in all the same API info.

I saved everything, and I tested my site with my own credit card to to see if it would in fact work--and it did without a problem. YAY!

Is anyone else doing this? I'm curious if you're also having success.

I did this same exact thing on my site, and it works...mostly. I don't get a button to pay via PayPal, only the credit card payment option. Did your installation work the same way?

I've just learned about PayPal Advanced, and boy am I kicking myself -- 17 months of paying $25 more than I needed to! Anyway, this thread is interesting to me for several reasons. First, Qphoria is selling a PayPal Advanced payment module for $45 -- and as much as I love Qphoria, I would like to avoid that expense. If PayPal Advanced works with the PayPal Pro payment option, then there doesn't seem to be any reason to buy the module. However, I think it's possible that NOT having the PayPal button on the final checkout page may be a violation of PayPal's terms; and if PayPal finds out, they'll probably have something to say about it.

Qphoria, do you have any thoughts on the advisability of using the PayPal Pro payment option with PayPal Advanced?

Are people generally happy with PayPal Advanced? Does anyone have any complaints?

I'm raising this thread to the top because it took me two years to get approved for PayPal Advanced. They didn't approve me in 2013 because I don't use credit any more and didn't have a credit record -- this despite the fact that I had used PayPal Payments Pro for more than a decade and had a perfect record (no chargebacks, no denied ACH withdrawals). When my application was denied, I switched back to PP Standard and cancelled my SSL certificate.

Since I use OC 1.4.8b and don't have an Advanced module installed, I simply put the API information into the PP Payments Pro module, and it worked. However, when I did a test purchase, the address line didn't say "https", so does that mean that the credit card information was being sent to PP without encryption? My recollection is that the PP Payments Pro payment method requires an SSL certificate.

So it would seem that my options are as follows: (1) to pay for an SSL certificate every year, or (2) to buy Qphoria's PP Advanced module. Is that about right? Does Qphoria's module work with OC 1.4.8b?

Thank you!

No one answered my question, so I called PayPal and got some answers, as follows:

1. OpenCart merchants are free to use the PayPal Payments Pro Module with their PayPal Advanced accounts. However, PayPal doesn't provide seller protection under those circumstances. (The reason has something to do with the way PayPal gets the credit-card information. If you are using the Pro module, the information is sent to PayPal via a secure connection. If you are using the Advanced module, PayPal is collecting the credit-card information itself via an "iFrame" on your site, and that makes a difference for some reason.) I was told that using the Pro module with Advanced doesn't violate any of their rules.

2. If you are using the Pro module with PayPal Advanced, you must pay for an SSL certificate every year, which you don't have to do if you use the Advanced module. You can get away with not buying an SSL certificate, but then your customers' credit-card information will be transmitted without encryption (and it won't say "https:" in the address bar, which some customers are bound to notice).

3. If you use the Pro module with PayPal Advanced, and you also want to accept PayPal payments, you must also activate the PayPal Standard module. The Pro module doesn't put a PayPal button on your checkout page, just the boxes for the customer's credit-card information.

One other thing: PayPal Pro and PayPal Advanced are technically different (different in ways that I don't entirely understand -- a Pro account, it would seem, just behaves like a merchant account, whereas an Advanced account taps into a payment gateway called PayFlow, and is closer to being a true merchant account). If you have a PayPal account which is more than a decade old, as I did, you will have to open a new PayPal account to get PayPal Advanced.