eCommerce Alternatives for Credit Card Processing? 24
A non-Anonymous Coward asks: "More and more these days, small businesses are selling their goods on the Internet, and are looking for a way to process their sales. Aside from purchasing a merchant account, and setting up systems that meet the requirements set forth by the payment processors, what alternatives do small business owners have? There are a few online companies that will process the money for you, and take a small portion of that, such as PayPal, authorize.net, 2checkout.com, and a few others, but what is the easiest to setup, with little hassle?"
Easy: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy: (Score:2)
authnet is the way to go for many small businesses (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, PayPal is nice and can actually function as a barebones shopping cart (think a couple dozen "Buy" buttons) and obviously they accept credit card payments.
PayPal easiest (Score:5, Informative)
MoneyBookers (moneybookers.com) is fairly straight forward too, but doesn't have the brand recognition of PayPal, and it a bit more cumbersome.
2Checkout, again, not the brand recognition, it's pretty cumbersome too, it's a bit costly.
Authorize.Net, last I looked it was just a (very popular, almost a defacto standard) merchant gateway, you still need a merchant account with your bank, which may or may not be suitable.
The thing with Merchant accounts is that they will be cheaper, providing you are doing enough transactions to make it worthwhile, if you are just doing a few dollars here and there then I think PayPal is a better option - particularly now your customers do not need a PayPal account.
It all depends on the volume... (Score:5, Informative)
There are gateways, merchant account providers/processor and then your bank account. The gateway is the mechanism that "authorizes" the transaction; the processor actually gets the money which then gets put into your banking account (usually a 2 day delay). Watch out for merchant accounts that can't do online processing, yes some don't.
The biggest issue to consider is the actual transaction volume. This will determine which way to go.
If you are only dealing with a few transactions a week, Paypal might be the best system to use. Most people shopping online know what it is, who owns it, and trust it. They have probably the highest fee's per transaction since they take a percentage of the sale (I know it used to be that way don't flame). Minimal setup cost, many shopping carts have support for it, and all you need is a bank account(doesn't matter what kind) to get the money.
For volumes of 5-10 a day, a merchant account and a bank account is a must if you are going to do any real business. This will let you at the very least do a simple credit card capture online (do not capture CCV codes, it's a no no) and process the cards by hand on a terminal. It will cost you money to setup the account and get a terminal (cheaper to get a virtual terminal) but you will make your shoppers happy. Why happy? Because they put in their CC number and checkout just like in a brick and mortar. No Paypal account to deal with.
When you get to 20+ a day, you will not want to manually charge all those orders. You will need to get a gateway provider and make sure your merchant account works with it. I know Verisign(which sold the payment division to Ebay) is a little evil(TM), but their PayFlowPro gateway is SOLID SOLID SOLID. I have used a few different gateways ... all have had serious problems and blackouts. Verisign has had ONE unscheduled downtime in 2 years of using them, and it was for less than an hour. Plus they work with almost every merchant account. The downside with them is that they charge a monthly fee and a transaction fee per sale over 1000 a month. Another plus side is that you have flexibility to use almost any merchant account provider with them and negotiate merchant fees down as you volume grows.
We do minimally 150 transactions a day and the Payflow Pro works great for us. I know of companies doing 10 times that using the same system as us with zero problems. Plus Payflow Pro works with many backend accounting and order management systems.
Merchant Accounts, Payment Platforms (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Merchant Accounts, Payment Platforms (Score:2)
PC Charge is crap. Stay as far away from it as possible. We wasted a simply ungodly amount of time and money waiting for them to get their support for First Data's internet protocol working. At one point they were sending us a new build about twice a week, insisting "this is the one that will work." It *never* worked and we finally switched to different software.
The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:5, Informative)
CC are an american thing. Do not let anyone from the US tell you differently. IF you desire business from abroad your best bet is to offer real alternatives. Wire transfer and such are not alternatives, they are expensive and slow.
Global Collect or Bibit or similar companies are probably your best bet for true international payment. Let specialists deal with the collecting.
Please yanks, do not mention such things a debet cards or whatever. You are americans, you cannot understand that the rest of the world uses different systems. Every single time the issue of non-credit card owners paying online comes up there are always some yanks who somehow think they know how payment systems in europe work. It gets old
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
My opinion is, that if you desire business from abroad (from an US point of view), credit card is still the best payment system as for now.
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
No they're not. They're everywhere. And yes, the rest of the world uses sometimes different systems but credit cards are used all over the world (yes, that means inclusive Europe) too.
Yes, credit cards exist here. Not many people have them, they use them almost never, and many people would specifically never use them over the Internet. We're used to other ways of paying - a direct bank transfer is most usual, or payment by rembours (where you pay the post man). Payment by SMS for small amounts is growing
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2, Interesting)
Credit cards are growing to be as popular here as in the US, over the internet as well. Looking at the popular hardware and music stores here in sweden - once upon a time they only accepted bank transfers and rembours, but now they *all* accept credit cards as well.
About bank transfers - have you ever had to contest a bank transfer, when you didn't recieve the correct merch
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
Shrug. I worked at several Internet shops, prepaid by bank transfer and rembours were the only options. I have a credit card, so I was paying the Hattrick subscriptions of ten people before they introduced payment methods where we could use a one time authorization instead.
All post means is that it's probably completely different for every European country as well...
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
Again: Credit Cards are neither for geeks only nor are they "used almost never". I know, some countries are different within europe, but credit ca
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:1)
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Vastly greater incidence of fraud (see next point)
2) Vastly more complicated financial and legal proceedings
3) Vastly more complicated and expensive shipment processes for physical products
4) Vastly more expensive marketing costs
5) to all the above, add the "fun" of i18n/l10n and every grotesque language barri
Re:The ones mentioned are all CC centric (Score:2)
Sorry - but as shitty as our government is, our country typically requires accountability. Sony is a very poor example case for us.