For many e-commerce sites reducing the abandonment rate of the checkout flow will have a substantial impact on sales. There are many factors which contribute to the typically high levels of cart abandonment beyond the price of the cart contents. Two of the largest are Trust and Complexity.

Trust comes down to any hesitations the shopper may feel about typing in their credit card information on your website. With the frequent news headlines about hackers, stolen credit cards, security breaches, passwords being cracked, online shoppers have become more security conscious and hesitant to provide credit card information online, even to reputable sites.

Complexity is the amount of time and effort it takes to complete your checkout process.  Many ATG sites in particular tend to have long checkout flows. This is in part due to the architecture of the default ATG checkout related form handlers leading most implementations to have separate pages for account registration or login, shipping address, shipping method, payment address , payment method, loyalty club information, review, and finally checkout. Some sites have even more pages! The more time it takes, the more typing a user has to do, the more times they have to re-type information, and the more they wait for pages to submit and load the next step, the less likely the shopper will be to complete the transaction. Time and attention are valuable resources.

Why Do You Need PayPal ATG Integration Module?

PayPal integration for your ATG site can provide strong benefits in both areas. PayPal is a well known and trusted brand for online payments with 113 million active accounts.  PayPal users don’t have to type their credit card information in again, and don’t even have to get out their wallets. They typically feel more secure about paying online using their PayPal account, than using a credit card. Offering a PayPal payment option will reduce the drop-out rate of your checkout flow due to trust concerns. Beyond the standard “select PayPal as a payment type during the checkout flow” option, PayPal also offers an Express Checkout mechanism, that with the proper integration work, can allow a shopper to leap from the Cart page, directly to their PayPal account, and have their saved PayPal account addresses used for shipping, provide shipping options and costs dynamically built from your site using an API call, and either return the user to the Checkout Confirm page, or even allows them to confirm purchase on the PayPal site, and return them to the “Thank you for your order” page back on your site. This can drastically simplify the length of your checkout flow and removes a lot of entering addresses and credit card information the user would otherwise have to spend time doing. I’m sure you can see the appeal of this “two birds with one stone” integration option.

ATG and PayPal

ATG and PayPal are a good fit, however actually integrating PayPal with your ATG application may not be simple, especially with the more tightly fused Express Checkout flow. ATG’s Payment Groups and checkout functionality are complex and in many areas poorly documented. Adding support for custom payment types to the CSC application is an extremely involved and convoluted process as well. And the PayPal integration documents, APIs, and requirements can be challenging for even the most experienced team. Even if you aren’t using the CSC though, an ATG – PayPal Express Checkout integration is a serious project requiring significant time investment for development and extensive testing. It is no small feat.

Sparkred® ATG PayPal Module

It allows you to simply drop in a PayPal certified complete integration between ATG and PayPal, supporting normal checkout, Express Checkout, and the ATG CSC. We have spent hundreds of man-hours building, testing, and certifying this module to ensure it works correctly, and is easy to integrate in with your ATG application. It’s build to support extension so even if your site has significant checkout and pricing related complexities, you will still be able to leverage the module quickly and easily. For a CRS-based ATG site, it’s typically a straight drop-in module with less than a day of work. Sparkred® ATG PayPal Module is available for ATG 9x, ATG 10x, and now ATG 11x and fully supports those versions of the CSC as well. It is in use by several large ATG sites, and we’ve worked closely with those companies and their systems integrators to ensure that the module is easy to integrate, is well documented, and performs as expected. We also include it as a part of Spark::red® ATG Commerce Hosting Package and have never experienced any issues with this software. The best part is that it’s FREE!

How do I get it?

Please, list our GitHub PayPal page to download the module. We will also help support your integration effort as much as possible and welcome any feedback on how we can improve the functionality or easy of integration of Sparkred® ATG PayPal Module. To leave the feedback visit https://github.com/sparkred-insight/PayPalModule/issues