Different Credit Card Options in PayPal Payments

Hi @jwayk016,

PayPal Payments provides two different methods to accept card payments:

• Standard Card Payments
• Advanced Card Payments

Standard Card Payments are card payments via the black “Credit/Debit Card” button.
By default, this button may be displayed within the PayPal gateway. So there are multiple payment buttons within the PayPal WooCommerce gateway.
With the Standard Card Button feature, you can separate this button from the PayPal gateway into a separate payment gateway.
Then you would have a PayPal and Credit/Debit Card radio buttons on your Checkout page.
From a payment perspective, the black button is always a Standard Card Payment, and it works the same whether it is separated into its own gateway or not. This button is an iframe provided by PayPal, and PayPal controls the look and behavior of the iframe.

Advanced Card Payments on the other hand provide you with more flexibility. This feature is only available for business accounts in certain regions and generally is the recommended option, if you are eligible.
This option integrates “hosted fields” on your site, which are a bit like iframes from PayPal, but these can be styled with CSS to match the look of your site.

You can read more about the differences in this section: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#paypal-card-processing-acdc

especially let me know which, if any, I should avoid if I don’t want to store credit card data on my website/in my website database

Neither card payment option stores any sensitive payment data on your site. All card details are processed directly on the PayPal servers. You can view the iframe or hosted fields as a small window to the PayPal servers. So when customers enter their card details on your Checkout page, they are actually entering the details on the PayPal server and your site does not know any details, e.g. card numbers.

Advanced Card Payments can be used with Vaulting to save credit cards for future payments: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#vaulting-saving-a-payment-method
But this would also only store the details on the PayPal servers and not on your site.

I hope this clears it up!
Let us know if any questions remain.
Thanks!

Kind regards,
Niklas

Hi Niklas,

Thank you for your response. It’s good to have confirmation that the Standard Card Button is essentially the same as Standard Card Payments and that none of the options require us to store credit card data on our site. Does the Advanced Card Payments functionality leverage PayPal’s Advanced Credit and Debit Card Payments or Payments Advanced? According to PayPal’s website on merchant fees, one requires a monthly fee, whereas the other does not.

Thank you,
J

Hi @jwayk016

The Advanced Card Processing feature leverages the Advanced Credit and Debit Card Payments: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/advanced/

As far as I am aware, “PayPal Advanced” is part of Payflow, which is not supported by PayPal Payments and can be considered an outdated PayPal product.
Advanced Card Processing should not have any monthly fees and in certain regions (e.g. US), the fees per transaction are lower than standard PayPal payments (including the Standard Card Button).
But for more details regarding the fee structure at PayPal, I suggest getting in touch with the PayPal Merchant Support.

Don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s anything else we can help with.

Kind regards,
Niklas