Merchant accounts & Banks

[dracula]

I use moneybookers.com you may check them up, easy to work with.

[mikeewart]

If you are a Costco memebr, look at their partner, NOVA. Weve used the for years without a problem.

[getmea]

When I signed up for a merchant account through Millenium BankCorp, they were simply the re-selller. They locked me in for 3 years. They hooked me up with Authorize.Net as the merchant and Pipeline Data Processing as the processor. They killed me with fees! It started out as $25/20 monthly...When I cancelled last month, the fees were $38.50/30. I had no processing problems with either, but cancelled in december due to Pipeline passing a $150 fee (besides the $100 annual fee) which VISA/MC passsed to them for each merchant. Turns out this is PCI Security Standards (.org) newest requirements from October, 2008.

Authorize.net processed out of country credit cards. Most merchant processors do. Since many foreign banks do not do Address Verification Checks, your system cannot ask for the verification otherise it will always return a bad response. For foreign transactions, either you will have to turn off the AVC or run the transaction manually.

I now use Paypal until I figure out what to do with Visa/MC...

CDG sounds interesting...

[martindow]

We use a local merchant account (we are UK based) for credit and debit cards but also offer Paypal as a payment option. About 15 per cent of customers choose to use this. There have never been any problems with chargebacks.

I think that there are millions of people with a small amount of cash in their Paypal account that they cannot withdraw without paying a fee. Using this balance is a very painless way of paying.

[netwebproworld03]

I can accept credit cards directly on the site via PayPal Pro. My site is membership subscription, and because of my nature of my site, I don't have any charge back yet. I have a 30 day money back, so customers who want to cancel just email me.

When people mention that they use PayPal, they should say if they are using PayPal Pro (on seller's site) or the PayPal Standard (on PayPal's site). The user experiences between the two are very different.

[justgowithit]

If you're business is located in the US, you could use a site like CardFellow and let the best provider come to you.

[jpatriar]

If anyone has used PayPal, I'd like to hear your opinion. I have one client who has had great success with Paypal. I have another client with only one glitch in the experience. However, when I tried to call with a question for a third client, I got an hour worth of runaround from one Paypal office to another and people who couldn't answer a Paypal site interface question. Of course, by the end of the hour, I was getting a bit on the rude side myself, and the final Paypal employee hung up on me. The difference is that they got to be rude for an hour!

I've been using PayPal for a long time. I only had 1 chargeback as the card was stolen. They caught it right away, emailed me before I shipped the item. They're not the most technical staff but they do have a forum PayPal Developer Community - PayPal Developer Community where you can get to some of the more technically advanced members.

[markrchisholm]

Worldpay are great, they start you off on quite a high transaction commission rate, however after 1 year they have a provision for giving you a discounted commission rate, they just don't tell you this until you ask and haggle it down. Be strong and bluff them that you will leave them if they don't reduce it. Remember nothing ventured nothing gained!

I would have to totally disagree with this. If you want to engage in silly games with them fair enough, but I can't be bothered to deal with such an unhelpful company.

We have just left WorldPay. They placed a stupidly big reserve on our account. We had been with them for over a year and it'd be 2010 before we hit the threshold where they would start to pay us.

They would review this amount for us if we supplied them with a year of audited accounts. Now our company is relatively big, the website that was just a trading name is really just a plaything, so I had no inclination to supply them with the whole companies accounts, and even with a years trading under our belts with no charge backs they were still inefficient enough not to fulfill our reasonable request.

I have just got off the phone with them now trying to get a simple answer to the question 'when can we expect to receive the money that you owe us'. The best answer the girl could give us is 'It could take anything up to six months', bearing in mind some of it has been with them for around a year now she's talking total horsecrap.

Apart from our personal experience with them, their online reporting system is so frustrating it's quite frankly not worth bothering with, it's just so fidley and annoying.

We have implemented Google Check Out which seem great, but can anyone recommend a good UK based payment processing system?

[biophase]

I use Authorize. net for all my ecommerce stores. I go through Chase Paymentech for my merchant account. One thing to do is haggle and negotiate your rates and sign up fees. Some places like to start at $300 to sign up and I've seen them come down to $50.

[rkelly]

I have them, CAREFUL of what you SIGN! When I tried to cancel (don't have credit card business anymore) they said I signed a 3 yr CONTRACT, it was in the fine print somewhere. What a rip off - they want $300 to cancel! That is the full $25/month flat fee, whats the point. Look at Sam's or Costco they probably have the best deal with no hidden fee's and cancel fees.