Website: PayPal

 

PayPal is the most widely used payment processor online, boasting over 164 million accounts across the globe. PayPal supports 17 currencies and is available in 190 markets around the world, thus using PayPal allows you to reach customers across a variety of currencies, languages and countries.

PayPal History

 

PayPal was formed with the merger of Confinity and X.com, which were founded in 1998 and 1999. X.com was founded as an Internet financial services company and Confinity was founded as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. eBay responded to the rise in volume of online payments by purchasing Billpoint in may 1999 (before PayPal existed), and it became their official payment system. As they cut functionality of Billpoint so that it only existed for eBay payments PayPal was listed in far more auctions than Billpoint. In February 2000, PayPal boasted an average of 200,000 auctions daily, whereas Billpoint had only 4,000.

 

eBay acquired PayPal in October 2002 for $1.5 billion, having been the payment preference of more than 50% of eBay users.

 

PayPal Merchant Services

 

PayPal's services can be split into two distinct categories. PayPal Website Payments is a complete processing package, whereby everything needed in order to accept credit card payments is provided by PayPal.

 

The other service, PayPal Payflow is a processing gateway only. Therefore you would need to obtain a merchant account from somewhere else should you choose this option.