D-OH!

Before I regal you with the full story of my stupidity let me set up the background of the story:

My company's website was redone last summer from the ground up. Thanks to the help of a very talented web designer we got the site up to par and inline with the company brand. Since 95% of my company's business is wholesale I added in a great password protected wholesale section that allows retailers to log in, see all of our wholesale information, and place orders anytime day or night. To process the orders I use a virtual terminal since not all retailers want their orders to ship immediately and I don't believe in billing them until shipping. Plus, I still get a lot of phone and faxed in wholesale orders and need a virtual terminal to process those credit cards. After a lot of searching I settled on using PayPal's merchant services since while not necessarily the cheapest, I felt that their rates were commiserate with the industry and their system the most user-friendly. It costs me $30/month to have the virtual terminal through them.

Still with me? There's more. When I had the site redone I did add in a retail store in case anyone wants to place orders directly through my site (and as such allowing me to capture the full retail price!) and while researching payment processors decided to go with PayPal's Standard Webstore payment program because it came highly rated. The only catch is that when it comes to the actual billing of the credit card, customers leave your actual site and go to a PayPal site to pay. I hate hate HATE the fact that it does that as I think it looks highly unprofessional but the system was free. There is an alternative, PayPal Websites Pro Verion which would enable customers to stay on my site the entire time while PayPal takes care of all of the backend processing. The catch, it's $30/month whereas the Standard version is free and retail makes up such a small part of my business I had trouble justifying the cost - especially when on top of the $30/month I'm already paying for the virtual terminal.

And here's where my own stupidity comes into play: I apparently don't know how to read.

In the not-so-fine print, if you actually read, it turns out that you can upgrade to the PayPal Website Pro version and it will include the virtual terminal in the $30 monthly fee. So I will still be paying $30/month - not $60/month - to get exactly what I need in both a seamless retail payment processor and a virtual terminal.

I almost have to laugh at my own stupidity...almost...