Well, a lot actually. Paypal has over 73 million active accounts – that's a large base of users. With an ecommerce Paypal enabled site this offers a payment solution that many are familiar and happy to transact with thus opening your doors to millions of customers worldwide. One does not have to go through the painfully process and paper work when setting up an account; like you do with a local payment gateway provider. It's simple, quick and easy and all done online.

Paypal operates in 190 different markets and offers 21 different currencies that one can transact through. It is less costly to operate than our local solutions. There are also no setup fees and monthly costs. You can compare their payment solutions and fees here.

With FNB you can now withdraw money from your Paypal account into your local FNB account (this was originally the biggest barrier to using Paypal in South Africa).

This all sounds too good to be true but it isn't. Except for one major set back currently. Having setup Paypal for a couple of South African clients an ecommerce site with Paypal can't accept payments in Rands (only one of the 21 supported currencies – Rands not being one of them). To work around this we had to convert from Rands to Euros before a customer is taken to the Paypal site to make payment. The payment however, is still done in Euros.

The support from Paypal is prompt. Although in my opinion it has never answered any of my questions and I feel it is sent from an automated system trying to best match my question with a predetermined answer.