Product Description
PayPal Virtual Terminal
The PayPal Virtual Terminal is provided by PayPal as an add-on to the Payments Pro product. It allows you to easily process phone, fax, and mail orders instantly from within your PayPal.com account. This PHP application replicates this functionality (and improves upon it) in a basic PayPal Virtual Terminal replica that you install on your own website domain. This allows you to process credit cards the same way you would using the PayPal Virtual Terminal they provide, but with a few added benefits.
Lower Transaction Fees
PayPal typically charges a flat-rate for processing payments based on your avg. monthly volume. The break-down is as follows:
| Avg. Monthly Volume | PayPal Fee Rate |
| $0 – $3,000 | 2.9% + 30¢ |
| $3,001 – $10,000 | 2.5% + 30¢ |
| $10,001 – $100k | 2.2% + 30¢ |
| $100k+ | Negotiable with PayPal. |
What many people don’t realize, though, is that PayPal charges a slightly higher rate for PayPal Virtual Terminal transactions than they do for other transactions. Virtual Terminal transactions would follow a similar model, but with slightly higher fees:
| Avg. Monthly Volume | PayPal Fee Rate |
| $0 – $3,000 | 3.1% + 30¢ |
| $3,001 – $10,000 | 2.7% + 30¢ |
| $10,001 – $100k | 2.4% + 30¢ |
| $100k+ | Negotiable with PayPal. |
Because our PayPal Virtual Terminal PHP application utilizes the Payments Pro and REST APIs you will get the lower rate model. This can save you a lot of money over the course of a year if you are processing a lot of PayPal Virtual Terminal transactions.
Compatibility
PayPal provides a variety of products that allow you to process credit cards including PayPal Website Payments Pro 3.0, PayPal Payments Pro 2.0, and the PayPal REST API. However, the PayPal Virtual Terminal is only provided if you have the full Payments Pro solution.
Our PayPal Virtual Terminal PHP application is compatible with each of these products, so you can use it even if you’re using the REST API, which does not require PayPal Pro and carries no monthly fee.
Credit Card Swipe
The PayPal Virtual Terminal requires you to key in all of the credit card data in order to process credit cards. This can be time consuming, especially if you are in a retail shop or at a trade show or something similar where you have a line of people waiting to pay for their products. Our PayPal Virtual Terminal PHP application adds the ability to swipe the credit card instead of typing the information which can save you lots of time and avoids data entry errors.
In order to use the swipe capability provided by the solution you will need a USB credit card reader that outputs data as keyboard emulation and includes both track 1 and track 2 from the card stripe. We recommend using credit card readers from our partner, USBSwiper.
Avoid Logging in to PayPal Account
The PayPal.com website can be annoyingly slow at times, and it will timeout on you quite often forcing you to keep logging in again. This can be problematic if you’re trying to process payments through-out the course of a day.
Our PayPal Virtual Terminal PHP app is installed on your own website host and loaded from your own domain. This way you do not have to log in to PayPal to use it, and you can protect the solution using your own methods from your own server.
Joseph Lee (verified owner) –
Awesome