Accepting credit cards

[caliguy80]

I do not want to use Paypal or 2CO, I have no faith in them, especially Paypal. I know they are popular for some people and everything, but I have my reasons. Plus Paypal just does not seem professional.

My business plan is calling for about $60,000 a month and hopefully in the next six months, we should be at about $75,000 a month. Maybe within the year we should be at about $150,000.

One of my partners has excellent credit and I have OK credit. Do processors look at both of our credit reports and do we have a chance at getting a merchant account?

Maybe even recommend a company that you are using?

Thanks you!

[Corey Bryant]

Welcome to the forums!

We use Cardservice actually and have been pretty happy. They are fairly large and have been in business for over 15 years.

It depends a bit on what you would like to sell.

-Corey

[StevenAllen]

Hello!

As the founder of EmerchantsGroup.com (600+ merchant members) I have a LOT of experience in this arena.
There are strategic ways of both getting the best plan and working thru and credit issues. Please feel free to drop me a line, if you need further assistance.

[caliguy80]

Thanks Steve, but I have heard of Cardservice and your site did not list the name of the processor or the acquiring bank that you used. That was what I was looking for.

My business partner's cousin uses Cardservice and he has had great success in the past three years with them. We have been in talks with Loud Commerce for a merchant account. It seems that we have made up our minds to use them. We have already completed the pre-application at Loud Commerce and chose the LinkPoint Gateway. We will electronically complete the application Monday for final approval.

We were mainly looking for a few different processors to check them out as well to see if we had missed any others. I did not see the name of your processor anywhere on the site unfortunately.

[StevenAllen]

Good luck Jeff!

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by caliguy80

I do not want to use Paypal or 2CO, I have no faith in them, especially Paypal. I know they are popular for some people and everything, but I have my reasons. Plus Paypal just does not seem professional.

My business plan is calling for about $60,000 a month and hopefully in the next six months, we should be at about $75,000 a month. Maybe within the year we should be at about $150,000.

I hate to be the one to burst your bubble or criticize a business plan, but it is VERY rare that an e-commerce site comes out of the gate with $60,000 a month in sales.

If they're like most sites on initial launch, they tend to be in the neighbourhood of...well, $0. It's harsh, it's cruel, it's callous, but the web doesn't traditionally lend itself to that kind of overnight success.

You may want to rethink that.

Also, PayPal is not the ideal solution IF you hit those volumes. Your merchant discount rate would be too high and it would cost you a pretty penny in the end.

Having said that, have you taken a look at www.goemerchant.com yet? Haven't used them myself, but I know they've been around a while and I think some of the other WPWers have (I'm in Canada persoanlly.)

[caliguy80]

I had looked at them (goemerchant.com) since they seem to be advertised everywhere but I am not a fan of the acquiring bank (Key Bank). I have noticed that most forums seem to be almost sponsored entirely of one ISO or another or have one dedicated person offering merchant account advice. That just never sat too well for me.

As far as goemerchant.com's discount rates, they were a lot higher than what I was given my LoudCommerce. I would say at least $200 a month in discount fees and about $100 or so a month in an electronic gateway fee. Plus LoudCommerce offer gateway support whereas Goemerchant goes not. And this is the low side of my business plan.

I understand your negativity towards our business plan, but when starting out we have to have these numbers for funding as well as the merchant account. We want our provider to understand our needs as well. But we already have 600 business customers so we wil be hitting that $60,000 fairly quickly at $99.95 each.

And yes, that is also why I do not want Paypal - their rates (although I could get them lowered) and I just do not like them. Everyone has a very strong opinion of Paypal and fortunately my business associates and myself all agree that Paypal is not the processor for our business plan.

And thanks Steve. So far everything is fantastic with the business. As always, it is much appreciated.

[jestep]

I have noticed that most forums seem to be almost sponsored entirely of one ISO or another or have one dedicated person offering merchant account advice. That just never sat too well for me.

The internet is a smaller place than most realize...

Unfortunately there are not a lot of ISO reps that participate in online forums. The main reason that I have found for this is the lack of objectivity in the views of many ISO's. For some reason most ISO reps also cannot, not promote themselves which is obviously looked down upon in discussion forums.

Of all the forums out there, this one seems to have the largest amount of qualified persons willing to contribute in the field of payment processing. Albeit only 3 or 4 people, it is still more than any other I have found.

Anyway, best of luch to you and your business.

Jamie

[brian.mark]

We've been using PayFlowPro for the gateway for quite some time now (almost 8 years) and have had no issues with them. We're doing considerably more than you're talking about processing within a year, so I don't know how our rates would compare at those lower volumes. We've used First National, Heartland Payment Systems and a few others for our merchant accounts. Overall, we've had nothing to report other than an error in our initial setup with Heartland leading to transfers being delayed 72 hours. They got that fixed pretty quickly and it's been smooth since then.

I think most larger processors are all fairly good quality. When you start making decisions based on fees instead of service you can have problems, though. Service is always our primary concern, fees being the secondary factor.

I'd never choose PayPal as a primary payment option, but as a secondary option I can see it being valuable. We're looking at adding it for check / balance transfer payments using their $20/month PRO setup. It'll be primarily for larger orders where companies don't want to use credit cards but have PayPal set up. We've had several orders where people have wanted to pay for them that way that were in the $15 - $20k range, so it'd be nice to add that and make it a smooth process instead of having to send out a PayPal invoice and waiting for so much back-n-forth emailing, etc.

Brian.

[caliguy80]

We were actually going to use Verisign's payflow services, but since they were bought by Paypal, that changed our minds. My business partner does not want anything to do with Paypal whatsoever.

LinkPoint is a lot cheaper as far as the transactions costs anyway so we decided to use them instead.

[ADAM Web Design]

What? You don't want to use PrayPal? Come on, they rock...if you just ignore the class-action state lawsuits, the lame API, and the almost complete inability to customize payment pages.

[mikelada]

hello everyone,

i was browsing the web and found this forum...i see some of you have questions about a merchant service provider..i have been in the merchant service industry for almost five years now..i work for a large MSP..US Merchant Systems...we handle taco bell, pizza hut, and little cesars just to name a few big corporations..my advice to all of you is to use authorize.net as a payment gateway..it is the most advertised gateway and the most popular gateway for online stores...i have worked for a couple other Msp's including cardservices..basically what i am saying is i know what i am talking about..if any of you have any questions regarding merchant services feel free to shoot me an email and i will help you any way i can

michaell@usms.com

[caliguy80]

Thank you for the offer. But we are using Loud Commerce along with a much better gateway (LinkPoint) in my opinion. And they actually answer any questions that I might have & helped me set up the LinkPoint integration. Plus Authorizenet.com actually closes down two day per year I read on their site for customer service while LinkPoint never shuts down. This was also very important to us since our web site is online all time and we did not want to be prohibited by any third party customer service.

I really did not have any questions - I was looking for some other ISOs / MSPs but I decided to go with my orginal choice - Cardservice.

[simplye]

Hi,

I'm new to this forum but after browsing for a while I found this topic. To be plain speaking "PayPal" are a bunch of amature idiots. Anyway, that's off my chest now. I use ClickBank, but then I only sell information products.

All the best

tina.....

[etechsupport]

Check it with the signature of Corey Bryant, you shall find some good information.

[Corey Bryant]

Thanks etechsupport!

[rybczyk]

Well, it's basically up to you. Credit is perfectly fine so, your preference.