Introduction

There has been a lot of confusion lately about what is happening with payment processing in WooCommerce, especially when it comes to PayPal.

In this article we are going to compare the two most popular options – our PayPal for WooCommerce plugin and the WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin – to help you decide which one you should use on your website.

The “official” PayPal plugin, although being developed by the Woo team, has received poor reviews because it simply does not work very well and they do not support it very well. 

On the other hand, our plugin has received great reviews and is known for its flawless integration with PayPal and excellent customer support. 

Let’s take a closer look at the history of PayPal in WooCommerce and details behind these plugins to figure out why the user experience has been so different between them.

History of PayPal in WooCommerce

PayPal Standard

Originally, WooCommerce included the old “PayPal Standard” payment gateway as part of its core feature set.  This provided the most basic PayPal integration possible.  It worked, but it lacked a lot of features and functionality.

PayPal has officially deprecated the original “PayPal Standard” integration, and WooCommerce removed it entirely from core functionality, so PayPal is no longer included with WooCommere core at all.

PayPal API Integration

PayPal provides a wide variety of options for integrating payments into applications using their APIs.  Originally they provided Express Checkout for PayPal wallet payments, and PayPal Pro for direct credit card processing.

There were plugins available for these products, but they were not very well developed, were filled with bugs, and I was not getting any quick resolution to these problems (or even acknowledgement for that matter.)

This is why we originally built our PayPal for WooCommerce plugin – because there simply wasn’t a good option available for the more advanced methods of integrating PayPal and credit card processing into WooCommerce sites.

Our plugin includes all of the different options that PayPal provides and quickly became the go-to plugin for PayPal payments in WooCommerce.

PayPal Commerce Platform

Beginning in 2021 PayPal updated all of their systems, and they have released a new set of APIs for developers to integrate their products called the PayPal Commerce Platform.

WooCommerce has provided a plugin for this, but there are many of the same issues as before.  

Of course, we have also added this to our plugin.

Let’s compare these plugin options and cover them in more detail.

WooCommerce Payments

WooCommerce, or more specifically Automatic, Inc., has been making some big changes to the way they handle payments in general, and especially when it comes to how they are handling PayPal integration.

They are now providing a hosted payments platform that they are calling “WooCommerce Payments – Powered by Stripe.”

Notice that they are using Stripe as their partner for payment processor instead of PayPal, and PayPal is not included in the WooCommerce Payments platform by default.

WooCommerce PayPal Payments

Instead of including PayPal in their new payments platform, WooCommerce is providing a separate plugin for PayPal – WooCommerce PayPal Payments.

You’ll notice from the reviews here that it is not being very well received.  

There are many issues with this plugin, and they are not supporting it very well.

Why Are They Not Supporting This?

It seems clear that PayPal is simply not their primary focus. 

They have partnered with Stripe and they are really pushing that platform while not focusing much on PayPal at all, so the tools and support they are providing for PayPal are simply not the quality they should be for something so important such as payments.

On top of that, they are doing the same with all sorts of other features on their platform (eg. taxes, shipping, page builders, web hosting, etc.)  

Payments are only a small piece of everything they are handling and trying to bring into their hosted platform.  

This stretches them very thin, and makes it difficult for them to specialize in any particular area of eCommerce in general.

PayPal for WooCommerce

Angelleye released PayPal for WooCommerce v3.0.0 in November of 2021 which introduced the new Commerce Platform to the plugin.

Complete Payments – Powered by PayPal

We have put our 20+ years of experience integrating PayPal payments behind our development of PayPal’s newest tools in our plugin.

We focus solely on PayPal, and making sure it “just works” like it should within WooCommerce.  

This includes PayPal Checkout, Pay Later, Venmo, and Direct Debit or Credit Card processing.

All of this in a single integration; Complete Payments – Powered by PayPal.

Save Money on Fees!

With our PayPal Complete Payments integration you will get access to “Advanced Credit Cards”.

This gives you the exact same experience as Stripe, Square, or any other card processor for a website. 

However, your combined fee for these transactions will be only 2.69% as opposed to the 2.9% that you see with other processors!

On top of that, there is no more monthly payment required like there was with PayPal Payments Pro. 

If you were using that you’ll be able to migrate to Complete Payments and then remove Pro and stop paying that monthly fee.

Conclusion

While much has changed in the landscape of PayPal payments in WooCommerce, the one constant is that the PayPal for WooCommerce plugin by Angelleye is still considered the best plugin available.

Obviously, we’re a bit biased, but we encourage you to do your own research and we are confident you will come to the same conclusion.