We just got back from Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas - what a great crowd of people, let me just say!

A lot of people talked about PayPal, both its benefits and its limitations. 

PayPal is like a really easy payment gateway.  Once you've collected all your customer's data, you simply request money from PayPal and they either approve or deny. 

The trouble folks run into is that e-Commerce demands a whole lot more than simply grabbing money from customers.  You need to be able to satisfy requirements PayPal simply doesn't provide, like:

• Online customers demand the ability to pay in their local currency and to read the order forms in their own language.
• You expect to be able to manage your own brand, not drop into a PayPal page.  You also need a way to track your transactions, linking the payment to the sale itself.
• You need to be able to provide customer support.  You want to run campaigns with coupons, to bundle your products and to run upsell and cross-sell promotions and more.

Of course, you can build all these things into your own custom e-Commerce engine.  But then, every time something goes wrong, you're on your own to fix it.  The longer it takes to fix, the longer you're offline.

These are some of the key reasons people choose to use an outsourced provider like Plimus: we take charge of providing all the e-Commerce features you need in addition to the payment processing.  When you compare the costs (and I'll write about these soon), it's a no-brainer.