PayPal APMs
Last updated: September 19, 2025
What are they?
With PayPal’s Smart Payment button, clients who have PayPal enabled as a payment processor automatically gain access to a range of alternative payment methods accepted by PayPal. These Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) appear as payment buttons beneath the yellow PayPal button and feature some of the well known payment options available such as Venmo, iDEAL, and P24 to name a few. A complete list of APMs provided by PayPal and their countries of operation is shown below:
| APM | Country |
|---|---|
| Bancontact | Belgium |
| Blik | Poland |
| EPS | Austria |
| Giropay | Germany |
| iDEAL | The Netherlands |
| Mercado Pago | Brazil, Mexico |
| MyBank | Italy |
| Przelewy24 (P24) | Poland |
| SEPA | 36 countries (27 EU members, 4 EFTA members and the UK) |
| Venmo | USA |
How do they work?
PayPal will take information from the customer’s browser/device to determine potential eligibility for APMs. They will then display those APMs as button options for the customer to select from. The customer is taken through the normal PayPal payment process and redirected back to our confirmation page upon a successful transaction.
Example: A customer in the Netherlands will see iDEAL as a payment method under the PayPal payment button:
Duplicate payment types
What if a client already has Bancontact or iDEAL enabled? Would their customers see two buttons to pay with Bancontact and/or iDEAL?
No, since there is some overlap between the APMs Stripe offers, and what PayPal offers, we will always give preference to the payment options enabled directly in the company’s advanced settings. This means if a company has both PayPal and iDEAL enabled, the iDEAL button will only be shown once and the PayPal iDEAL APM will be hidden.
Are the processing fees different?
The processing fees for APMs are the same as the client’s PayPal processing fees based on their contract with PayPal. We do not set those as we do with Stripe.
Can we enable or disable them per company?
Right now, PayPal-generated APMs are either on or off for all companies using PayPal. Pending a solution found with PayPal on some of the issues we’re seeing we are shutting the feature off through our code. In the future we will explore ways to potentially enable the feature on a per company level.