Redundant Credit Card Processing Solution?

RokaMoka asks: "As I type this, I'm on hold with Verisign Payment Services, our (only) merchant services provider. I run several e-commerce sites, and how shall I say... 'tis the season. At the moment, VPS is totally down, and I am losing thousands of dollars per hour. Does anyone have any experience in designing and supporting e-commerce solutions with multiple vendors for CC processing? What other networks are out there, and what has been the customer experience with them? What should the strategy be, load-balance or fail-over?"

Have several options for payment...

[zogger]

...and even beyond credit cards. There's e-gold, Norfeds, even faxing a check direct. CCs just cost you money, any way you look at it. It's *handy* to have a CC vendor,and as you can see it can also cause a problem, but it's also handy to store your loot and work with your loot in something besides federal reserve note digits being handled by the CC company loan sharks that isn't dropping daily in worth. In case you ain't seen it, the US funny money printing press buck is sinking pretty severely now because the rest of the planet has noticed they don't really have to filter their reality through it any longer, it's become redundant and expensive.

I know this is tangentially off the direct question, but just wanted to point out there are alternatives, and it doesn't hurt to offer them to your customers, and it's easy enough to do as well.

Re:Eh?

[Ark42]

No kidding, I hardly make 'thousands of dollars per hour' but I can afford a merchant account and the interface linkpoint [linkpoint.com] provides is great.

Its more about not wasting a huge % of each sale on the fees these middleman guys charge just to process a card. Places like regnow.com charge near 20% of your sale last I checked. Get a merchant account and its a mere 2.9% + 35c per transaction or so.

Re:Change processors

[adolf]

Peak season freeze?

Sometime in about the past week, the entirety of the Fifth Third Bank [53.com] website changed. Looks like they decided to roll out all a whole new look-and-feel, while mucking up the login procedures again.

So as long as you're boosting your employer, I'll knock 'em down a bit:

Why the fuck would you change something broad like the entire user interface during the busiest time of the year? And what's the gig with the tiny fonts?

But that's not all, no sir: Dispite all of its newness, the new website still fails to let me transfer funds between my accounts. And I can only presume that still nobody has any clue why. Everyone I talk to at that god-forsaken bank suggests that it should work fine, that the accounts are "connected," and so on.

But in the dropdown list, there's only ever one account present. Tried Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox under several different Linux distributions, several versions of IE under several versions of Windows, each at several different venues with several different ISPs.

In each case, the HTML with which to render multiple accounts in a dropdown is absolutely absent. Your shit is broken, and has been for years.

And also: Your people stink. They botched my first checking account before I even had a chance to use it, and they lost the flood insurance renewal that I hand-delivered to them instead of paying it like they were supposed to. And then they sent me a nastygram a few weeks later, proclaiming that they were going to sell me some different insurance of their choosing if I failed to jump through several itemized hoops.

The people are so bad, in fact, that the only reason I continue to do my banking business with them is that they were the only place stupid enough to give someone like me (negative credit, negative income, no trade lines, so on, so forth) enough money that I could buy a house.

A reliable datacenter does not a good company make.

Beware.

Re:Change processors

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're really interested in the mechanics of CC processing, I used to work for one of the largest CC transaction providers in the UK (retail logic).

During 2000, the acquirers dropped PCConnect (I think it was) in favour of FTP as PCC wasn't y2k compliant. So, now, all your batched card payments are transferred to the CC via FTP.

Sure its all private LAN type stuff, or VPN of course, to write-only directories. (and Amex doesn't even tell you whether your transfer has succeeded - you have to wait til the next day to find that no payments have been made before you retry).

And to really top it off, the premium product (Solve) was originally written by the CTO on his Atari ST. Credit Card payment processing really is cutting edge!