Started out with PayPal and was very satisfied.
Once business increased and I had a few customers complain about using PayPal, I got a merchant account. I use Total Merchant Services (2.2% with $0.25 per transaction fee) and Authorize Net. Very happy with them both. Total Merchant Services had limited me to $5000 a month in transactions, but I blew through that in first 10 days after I set the system up in November, and I blew through it again in the first 4 days of December. I just called and let them know what was going on and they were ok with it. They were contemplating holding back extra funds in reserve, but never did. I might mention, excellent credit has a lot to do with how merchant accounts treat you or if you can even get a merchant account.
Fees are not killers if you have the business. I just read that CostCo has merchant accounts with even lower fees. I may check into this in the future.
Since my website is all html and I build and maintain it, I wanted an easy to use html shopping cart, like PayPal's. I was familiar with PayPal's cart also. I hooked up with CoolCart and I've been pretty pleased with it (
www.coolcart.com). Simple html code. Cost $10 a month for 200 transactions or less. The CoolCart is interfaced directly with Authorizenet and PayPal so I can use both services or customers can check a box to print out their order and send it with Check or Money order or call with their credit card information. I get about 10% of my business still with PayPal.
I might note that both Authorizenet and PayPal have the security certificates necessary to be a safe and secure website so you do not have to pay for these yourself. I did get a lot people using my shopping cart to test the validity of credit cards, i.e. seeing if a stolen number would be accepted. I use the address verification system in authorizenet and none ever got through, but, at times 70 or more trys a day to pass a fraudulent credit card were sent through my shopping cart. I asked CoolCart to do something about it and I assume they did since the trying stopped. Out of approximately 600 transactions in December and January, only two were fraudulent. I lost a small amount on the first, but caught the second before the product was ever sent.
Anyway that's my story, I can't complain about any of the services I've got. Again, I'll mention, you need to have good credit in order to get a merchant account. You don't need a merchant account though if you are only doing a $1000 or so worth of transactions a month. Better just to stick to PayPal and work first on increasing your business through advertising and
SEO'ing. No use worrying about a Merchant Account if you don't have the business. If you don't have the credit rating, you'll be stuck using those services that charge 5%-15% of each transaction total plus $0.45 per transaction. That's a lot of money, those services are taking a risk on you. I was doing $8K a month in business through PayPal when I got the merchant account and I was overdue to get one.
kent
www.discount-leather.net