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My name is Brandon Crotts, I am the product Manager at ProPay. We're really excited that ProPay has been added to the list of acceptable payments on eBay. We're extremely concerned about protecting sellers and we have several features that will protect our customers against fraud. Hopefully this is an appealing option for you. If you want more details on Propay check us out at ProPay.com.

you may want to consider ProPay. I have no association with the company, just have used it for transactions as an alternative to paypal and have not seen the same criticisms of ProPay which paypal receives.

While my experiences with ProPay have been limited, I have not had a problem yet.

Perhaps someone has some insight regarding the services ProPay, a competitor of PayPal?

I've heard some good things about ProPay.

http://www.propay.com

It doesn't require users who are paying you to create an account, but it does have a higher per transaction fee.

I don't think it's a PayPal deal, but AIMPhone may be on-target. The "AIM Pay" icon is a service icon - the kind that shows up next to your buddy, indicating what service they're using (AOL, AIM, ICQ, etc). So it would seem that "AIM Pay" is meant to be a distinct kind of service, not just a client feature. It seems reasonable that people who sign up for AIMPhone might be considered "AIM Pay" users, but I dunno. I still wouldn't put it past AOL to start charging a monthly fee to keep your AIM name active.

For what it's worth, the "AIM Pay" cicn resources have been present since the 3.0 generation of Mac AIM clients. But if they don't plan on charging for AIM, you'd think they'd have removed the icons.

BTW, if you think PayPal rocks, check out ProPay. They let you bill anyone, not just other (paypal|propay) users. Their fee is 3.5% + 35 cents/transaction. Not bad.

Shaun

Does anybody else hate it how posting at some point in a discussion is futile, even if you have something important to say?

Anyway, there's another service called ProPay.com.
I interviewed with them a few weeks ago. Their head developer seemed quite clever, but I asked him a few times if they were worried about PayPal, and what he thought their strengths were. I'm not sure why, but he said "it's the other way around. They're afraid of us." He admitted their market lead, but said they didn't have the technical and marketing edge they did. Hmmmmm.

1) traditional merchant account (about $30 a month) + lower discount (% of each charge, usually 1.5%-3%) + per-charge flat fee ($.25 to .35).

All the major players have decent methods for integrating their system into your site, everything from hosting the whole shopping cart to various flavors of "your cgi page calls our cgi page, we do the transaction, we redirect back to some cgi of yours with the results". The hackery involved is trivial.

After having problems with one provider who had an annoying habit of randomly double-charging customers, I settled on Anacom and they've been flawless. They've also been around a while.

Option 2 - charge without a Merchant Account. You pay about 1% more on the discount, but unless you're doing $3000 a month in sales or more, you still come out ahead. ProPay seems to be the leader here, but I have no personal experience with them [some of my SelfPromotion.com users have recommended them, though.

3) Indirect, using a web-bank service like PayPal, which just announced a business service. The rates seem a little better if memory serves, but the downside is that people have to be paypal users to use it. My advice is that you should offer PayPal as an OPTION along with (1) or (2) above.

Best,R