Paypal Express checkout seems to have some advantages over the regular Paypal Plugin, has anyone had success with this ?
From what I can tell the advantage is if you use PayPal as a Credit Card processor it will allow you to keep the customer on your site and communicate via API whereas today they are redirected to the PayPal website. If the user pays via PayPal account, however, they will still be directed to the PayPal site. Another advantage is that it will do away with the IPN which may speed up approval for some customers.
One of the pains with how the PayPal system works today is that it is option for the user to push the "Return to Merchants" site link which means analytics (specifically goal tracking) is pretty skewed as this logic and code lives in the thanks.php. I don't believe that Express makes this better as PayPal payments (non cc# payments) still get redirected to PayPal. Perhaps a way to get around this is to present a Thanks page the first time they log in if they did not see it during checkout?
Stay on the site, never leave PP payment I am convinced that I have seen a stay-on-the-site paypal express payment method used on the web someplace. Even simpler than the Payflow model, the client just enters their username and password into the shopping cart and its charged to their PP account without every leaving the site - I though this was PP Express Checkout, but obviuosly not.
From what I can tell Express gives you that for credit card but not PayPal (?!?!) A few bigger sites I've been to (GoDaddy, Ebay, etc) allow me to do all of my PayPal configuration on their site without being redirected to PayPal's site.. perhaps they do some meddling with a pseudo renewal like transaction or perhaps they have hooks we don't Anyone know how to do this?