Tag Archives: PayPal

Announcing PayPal Checkout with One-Click Onboarding

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We’re excited to announce that PayPal Checkout is now available on Spiffy Stores — with a streamlined, one-click onboarding process that makes it faster and easier than ever to start accepting payments.

Why PayPal Checkout?

PayPal Checkout gives your customers more ways to pay securely, without leaving your store. When a shopper chooses PayPal at checkout, a secure PayPal window opens where they can:

  • ✅ Log in and pay with their PayPal account
  • ✅ Pay by credit or debit card as a guest (no account required)
  • ✅ Choose Pay in 4 (where available) to split their purchase into four interest-free payments

As soon as the payment is confirmed, the window closes, the order is created and marked as paid, and your customer receives their confirmation email.

This smooth process is a big improvement over older PayPal integrations like Website Payments Standard, which could leave unpaid or abandoned orders in your system. With PayPal Checkout, only confirmed payments create orders — keeping your records clean and accurate.

Benefits at a Glance

  • ✅ Seamless checkout – Customers stay in your store without being redirected off-site
  • ✅ More payment choices – PayPal, debit/credit card (guest checkout), or Pay in 4 installments
  • ✅ Free Pay in 4 – No extra fees for customers to use installments
  • ✅ No unpaid orders – Orders only appear after confirmed payment
  • ✅ One-click setup – Automatic onboarding, no manual credentials needed
  • ✅ Detailed orders – Includes a full line-item breakdown in PayPal
  • ✅ Tracking updates – Order tracking info syncs to PayPal for dispute protection
  • ✅ Future-ready – Replaces legacy methods like Website Payments Standard and Express

One-Click Onboarding

As an official PayPal partner, Spiffy Stores now supports automatic onboarding. This means you can connect your PayPal account to your store with just a single click — no technical knowledge or manual credential setup required.

All you need is a PayPal Business account. If you don’t have one yet, you can sign up during the onboarding flow. If you’re using a personal PayPal account, you’ll be prompted to upgrade by adding your business details.

Migrating from Older PayPal Integrations

If you’re currently using PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, or even a manually configured PayPal Checkout, we strongly recommend migrating to the new version. You’ll unlock all of the benefits above while creating a faster, simpler checkout for your customers.

The migration is straightforward:

  1. Note down your current PayPal settings.
  2. Deactivate your existing PayPal integration.
  3. Enable the new PayPal Checkout in your Spiffy Store Toolbox.
  4. Follow the one-click connection process to link your PayPal account.

That’s it — your store will be ready to accept payments through the new PayPal Checkout.

Ready to Get Started?

Log in to your Spiffy Store Toolbox, head to Preferences → Checkout & Payment, and select PayPal Checkout to begin.

With PayPal Checkout, you’ll be giving your customers a smoother, more flexible payment experience — and you’ll enjoy easier setup, cleaner order management, and better dispute protection.

Credit Card Surcharges can be your Secret Sauce

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Getting your business online involves choosing an ecommerce platform like Spiffy Stores, but there are large number of features to consider when trying to make a choice between different platforms.

Credit Card Surcharges can be your Secret Sauce

In fact, for Australian merchants, there’s pretty much only one feature that really makes any difference!

Does your chosen platform fully support surcharges for credit cards and other payment methods?

I’ll explain why this is pretty important. Let’s say you accept payment by credit card or PayPal. For PayPal, you could be looking at having to pay up to 2.6% of the transaction as a merchant fee. Now this means that your net profit on the sale of an item is cut by this amount. If your ecommerce platform doesn’t support surcharges, then you need to increase the advertised price of the item by 2.6% to maintain your profit margin.

Now, considering that credit card surcharges are pretty well accepted as a normal cost for payment processing in Australia, there’s no real disadvantage to adding a surcharge at checkout time. This means that if you’re adding a surcharge, then you can decrease the advertised price of the item without suffering any loss in profits.

This turns out to be a secret advantage that you will have over your competitors. If all your competitors are using Shopify, then they don’t have the option of adding credit card surcharges. Shopify’s platform has been built for and is largely driven by the US market, where surcharges are often illegal. This means your competitors must increase their prices to cover the merchant fees, or suffer a loss in profits.

So for a Spiffy Stores platform merchant, the difference is clear. You can advertise the same item at a lower price than your competitor, without having to sacrifice any profit margin. As we all know, shopping on online has made it very easy to do price comparisons, so for the same item, the store that has the lowest advertised price will most likely pick up the sale.

And that’s it. By choosing Spiffy Stores your online business gets a head start on all your Shopify competitors without any loss of profits.

Spiffy Stores offers the ability to set credit card surcharge rates for individual credit card brands, and also for PayPal payments. It’s fairly likely that at some stage surcharges will be allowed for Buy Now, Pay Later schemes such as Afterpay, and we’ll be able to implement support for that almost immediately.

Spiffy Stores is an Australian-built and owned ecommerce platform that aims to fully support Australian merchants in a way that is lacking in most of the major global platforms. We’ll be adding new articles on a host of other features that can help you, as an Australian merchant, improve your sales and cut down the time and effort required to keep your store up and running. If you have any questions on how we support credit card surcharges, please contact us at support@spiffystores.com.au

Expanded Payment Surcharge Options Now Available for Australian Merchants

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Surcharges for payments by credit card are now fairly common in the Australian market place, and came about from an RBA review into the payments system, which recommended greater transparency for consumers.

These sort of regulations, however, do not exist overseas… especially in the US. This means that support for adding surcharge payments to orders is basically non-existent, and is not really likely to be added in the near future by US-dominated ecommerce platforms.

In case you hadn’t realised, Spiffy Stores is 100% Australia owned, so of course we’re more concerned with meeting the needs of our Australia based merchants. Today’s announcement demonstrates this point.

So we’re happy to announce that our payment surcharge options now include the ability to add a percentage surcharge to all PayPal transactions, in addition to our existing credit card based surcharge options, which allow differing surcharges based on the credit card brand.

Perhaps one of the important lessons we’ve learnt from the global pandemic is that maybe there are some things we don’t really want to get from overseas! It’s been a reminder that there are benefits in looking at local solutions for many of our needs.

Shouldn’t this also be true when you are considering what platform you choose as the basis for your own business?

I guess the bottom line is that with Spiffy Stores, you’re going to get a platform for your online business that is aligned with your needs as a business owner. The same can probably not be said for the US-based platforms that you may be considering.

New Australian payment gateways available

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We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added payment gateways from Suncorp Bank and Bendigo Bank to our supported Australian payment gateways.

This means that you now have even more options for accepting credit card payments directly in your online store.

Our current direct payment gateways available to stores in Australia are:

  • Advam
  • ANZ eGate
  • Bendigo Bank
  • Camtech
  • Commonwealth Bank CommWeb
  • eWay
  • NAB Transact
  • NetRegistry
  • PaySecure
  • PaymentExpress
  • SecurePay
  • Suncorp Bank

These are in addition to our support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.

PayPal Express now available

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If you’re especially observant, you may have noticed the PayPal Express Checkout button in the Showtime Theme demo that we posted yesterday.  I can confirm that yes! PayPal Express Checkout has been added to Spiffy Stores, and can be set up to replace (or along-side) the PayPal option in the checkout.

Enabling Paypal Express Checkout in your store should help decrease the number of abandoned carts/orders that store owners experience who rely on PayPal to process transactions, as it takes the customer directly to the PayPal checkout from the shopping cart page to place their order.

We’ve been hard at work adding a little tag to everyone’s store to support the new feature, and it’s been included in all of the Spiffy Stores e-commerce themes.  If you’ve somehow missed out, and want to add the button to your store, there are instructions on how to do this in our knowledge base.

Making your Orders just a bit more Secure

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Here’s a quick update on a small security update that was added to Spiffy Stores this morning.

When payments are made using PayPal, we are given some information about the status of the customer’s PayPal account. In particular, we are told whether the customer is using a PayPal verified account or not to make the purchase.

This account status is now available from the Order History payment link whenever a payment is made.

You will normally see an item in the Order History like,

10:38am The customer successfully paid....

Click on the line and it will take you to the payments detail page. On the Message line you will now see something like
Received payment from gateway - Payer Status verified

If you receive a payment from an unverified account, you may wish to exercise a little more caution in processing the order.