Novedge Now Offers PayPal Checkout

I'm proud to announce that Novedge is now offering the power, security, and user protection of PayPal checkout. According to PayPal, 43% of North American online shoppers have used PayPal, while 24% of North American online buyers consider PayPal their favorite way to pay online.

Starting today, Novedge customers have the option to choose between the easy and reliable Novedge checkout or the popular PayPal checkout. I believe this is an important feature for all our customers and visitors.

we never store credit card information

At Novedge we take data security very seriously. We use the most advanced technologies and tools to protect our customer data and to make every purchase as safe and simple as possible. One important thing many of our customers don't know is that we never store credit card information, regardless of the checkout process you choose. When you add a product to the Novedge shopping cart and you choose the Novedge checkout, the website will ask for your credit card information. As we receive your information, we forward it to Authorize.net, our credit card service. In a matter of seconds, we receive a confirmation and a transaction ID from them. During the entire process, your credit card number and expiration date are never stored on our servers. Personally, I believe that not storing credit card numbers is the best way to protect our customers and Novedge.

With PayPal checkout, we've added an additional level of security. If you have a PayPal account, you can choose to rely on PayPal for the payment to Novedge. The integration between Novedge and PayPal is complete and should provide a smooth purchasing experience. If you click on the "PayPal checkout" button on the Novedge shopping cart, you will be redirected to the PayPal website where you will have to login and complete the transaction. Then you will be redirected back to a Novedge page that will provide you with your order number and a link to your invoice.

From a business point of view we don't expect any huge increase in sales as reported by other merchants, such as Michael Roebuck. Michael claimed a 300% increase in sales! I think of PayPal more as a service to our customer than as a sales-booster. According to PayPal, most businesses get a more reasonable average sales lift of 14% by accepting PayPal.

I found PayPal documentation not very well organized

Note for web developers: if you plan to integrate your shopping cart with PayPal, it will take just a few days of work. The integration is easy and doesn't require any special skills, apart from the usual web techniques. In our experience, the major difficulties come from adapting your shopping cart style and approach to the pre-defined PayPal style and approach. For example, PayPal likes to have a shipping cost defined for each individual item in the shopping cart while many websites, e.g. Novedge, have more sophisticated ways to calculate the shipping cost. Some problems can also arise from the PayPal documentation. Contrary to Wikipedia opinion, I found PayPal documentation not very well organized. You may have to look at several documents, each one focused on one specific topic, and will have to figure out the whole picture mostly by yourself.

Franco Folini