Are ya Gettin' Paid ? ....... and How ?

[cyanide]

One of the most difficult aspects of running an ecommerce website and even just building revenue online is finding a suitable payment method.

There's merchant banks / gateways, echeques
Who to choose or what to use, is one of the most common questions for those of you considering opening up an online shop and some of you may have made the mistake of utilizing a payment method that for whatever didn't work for you.

So?

How do you accept payments online ?
Who do you use and why ? Pros and Cons ...

Did you have a hard time getting started?
Any advice to newbies entering the wonderful world of ecommerce? If so, please post your tips.

Had a bad experience with a company? I don't want to turn this into a rippin' / slander contest. All businesses have a right to earn a living, so let's not trash them. Companies / people do make mistakes.

Once feedback has come in, I will post a sticky to help newbies cut through the clutter.

Please abide by the rules > no self-promotion

Thank you

[wclew]

About a year ago, I designed a website for my friend to sell his pottery on. It is located at www.harvestpottery.com. I had never done a website that accepted credit cards before. After much research we narrowed it down to 2 choices: PayPal or 2checkout.com. I didn't like the idea of forcing customers to sign up for a middle man processor like PayPal, I was afraid we would lose some people who would've otherwise bought something. So we went with 2checkout.com who accepts credit cards directly. They charge a very reasonable amount and it was very easy to setup. This is the only merchant I have dealt with so far, but I am very pleased with them.

[klessig]

I just went through this. I started with my own Verisign account and a merchant account $500 later I swithched to Paysystems! Much happier with paysystems the look is more professional. Check out my implementation www.metrolot.com click on the sign up page. If you want to be taken seriosly don't use PayPal!

[Diana]

This is the thing I keep trying to beat into client's brains. Paypal does what is good for Paypal. Paypal can & will (and has) changed things without notice which has caused carts utilizing their IPN service to no longer work.

I still can't get everyone to switch from Paypal though. LOL

My merchant bank is EPS, their online solution (http://eps-na.com) works with popular cart solutions like osCommerce & cpCommerce. I like it and they have good customer service (reasonably anyhow).

I've also used Securepay (http://securepay.com). Didn't like their customer service, they're still billing me even though I cancelled months ago. I've been going round and round with them. I'm going to have to close my checking account and open a new one...grrr. They also work with osCommerce & cpCommerce.

Also have used Plug-n-Pay (http://plugnpay.com). Horrendous customer service. Charged extra for recurring billing, a must for my hosting biz. Even when the recurring was paid for (by the guy my account was through) they cancelled it on my account. Very frustrating, and did not discontinue billing once account was cancelled. Had to close my checking account. Worked with osCommerce.

I always prefer to use an alternate cart program, instead of the carts that "come with" the payment systems. It makes it much easier if you have to change processors. :)

Diana

[webgoddess68]

If you want to be taken seriosly don't use PayPal!

I don't agree with this at all. At least 95% of my clients pay me by PayPal. I don't force a client to sign up if they don't have it...I use ProPay in that case. But more and more sites are offering PayPal as a form of payment. I prefer to be paid with PayPal because I have instant access to the money with my PayPal debit card. And I watch for online stores that accept PayPal as a form of payment.

I honestly don't believe that offering PayPal as a forom of payment for your e-commerce sites causes people to not take you seriously. Now e-commerce sites that offer me nothing more than a form to submit where I have to manually enter the products I want to buy into said form...THOSE I don't take seriously because obviously they don't take their business seriously enough to invest in even one of the many free shopping carts available out there. But the form of payment a site accepts has no influence on how serious I take them.

I like PayPal and ProPay because I can't see investing that much money into a payment processor that in some months I may not even use. I used to have a merchant account and I was paying out so much in fees that it just wasn't worth it for me. Should my volume of cc payments get high enough, I'll consider going back to a regular merchant account. In the meantime, PayPal and ProPay do me just fine.

[kellenltd]

I think PayPal is an OK solution to start a business. But when you start growing, you feel that it doesn’t fulfill your needs any more. Especially if you have customers overseas. PayPal has a pretty long list of countries they work with. But it most cases it is a fiction, because to open a PayPal account, for example a resident of Israel must have an account at an AMERICAN bank.

2checkout.com is very easy to set up. Good things about them are that they don’t have any monthly and annual fees. But the percentage they charge per transaction is pretty high. Two other things I don’t like about them are (1) they transfer money to your bank account only twice a month and often postpone the transfer, and (2) recently it seems they have TOO MANY customers so their server is too busy. For the last couple months we had several issues when customers were not able to complete a purchase because the 2checkout page never loaded.

So, we started out with PayPal, went through 2checkout, and ended up with Authorize.net. We pay $49 annual fee, but their percentage is lower than 2checkout and they transfer money to our bank immediately after each transaction. The only negative thing I can tell about them is that it takes a lot of paperwork to open an account with them. Or maybe is it a good thing???

[kjohnson5576]

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

[DrTandem1]

I have had a lot of customer confusion when I offered both PayPal and a real-time shopping cart with a payment gateway on an e-commerce site. I have also heard a lot of problems caused by PayPal. I still offer it on my site, but I will probably discontinue it from lack of use.

PayPal offers the ability for visitors to use credit cards on your site, even if you don't have a merchant account. However, if at all possible, I recommend that the client set up a merchant account and accept credit cards directly. The reasons are less problems and many visitors don't have PayPal and it's just another obstacle.

For those that don't want to pay for real-time processing of credit cards, there are some free alternatives. One is Mal's E-commerce. I have used it and have had clients use it without any trouble. It is transparent to the visitor. If you want to see it in action, visit my site here:

http://www.drtandem.com/Web-Site-Critique.htm Click on Order at the bottom of the page and use the ficticious credit card number: 4111 1111 1111 1111 and an expiration date of anything beyond the current month and year. This will allow you to see it all the way through the process as a visitor would.

Mal's sends an e-mail to the website or whomever you designate to let them know that an order has been received. You log into your secure account at Mal's and retrieve the visitor's information. You would then process their credit card purchase as you would on a virtual terminal or by phone. It's not as easy as a real-time purchase for you, but it's the same for the visitor. Don't forget, it's free. You can also upgrade to a real-time account for a small monthly fee.

Free carts are great for a small client that doesn't want to invest a lot of money. Plus, you don't have to spend a lot of time setting up a gateway.

[Diana]

You don't necessarily have to have good credit to get a merchant account. I got one within a year of a personal bankruptcy (hubby wasn't making very smart $$ choices). All I had to do was show that the bankruptcy was discharged.

I pay the same rate quoted above. Better with AMEX (I love AMEX!)

Granted, really horrible, horrible credit can prevent you from getting it, but many merchant account places will work with you to get you into a terminal. They may rent it to you, instead of leasing it to you through a leasing company.

-Diana

[cyanide]

Thanks for everyone's replies, so far

I'll start building the sticky very soon.