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Off-Site Credit Card Processing?

Posted by Cliff on from the doing-business-online dept.

fornix asks: "We have a few family run sites running cheaply on Apache/mod_perl/Linux/MySQL over a DSL connection. Some of them are selling arts and crafts types of things and we would like to be able to process credit cards simply and cheaply. We don't want to use a canned co-hosted shop since we would have to give up mod_perl, which we are using extensively. Is there an e-commerce solution provider that will process our credit card orders (no other services needed) for no monthly fee, but just a percentage of the sale?"

5 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Here is what you can do.. by chowda · · Score: 2

    Just make a form with a spot for all relevant credit card info (i.e. name, number, exp. date) and write it into a text file. Then once a week you send them to me. I take them to this guy I know, bob "chainsaw" griffin, and he gives me $100 for every number that works! I give you 60% and everyone is happy...
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  2. Only place I know of... by ThePixel · · Score: 2

    I have done quite a bit of development work for a company using Authorize.Net. I'm not exactly sure of thier pricing scheme, but the company I've done the development work for is quite small, I would supect they have some sort of plan for smaller companies.

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  3. The first one is always free... by Animats · · Score: 2
    How long will it be free? How does their business model work if they are not charging the sender or the receiver the 2% to 3% charged by Visa/MC/et al?

    Yeah. Cybercash used to be free; now they take a cut. Yahoo Store (formerly Viamall) used to be flat rate; now they take a cut and force you to do online payment processing through their favored bank. Be careful about getting locked into some outfit without a long term contract.

  4. Re:PayPal, et al. by rjamestaylor · · Score: 2
    PayPal works very nicely. They had some negative comments on eBay's forums a while back, but that seemed to be due to growing pains. Now they've merged with other industry players and seem pretty strong.

    That said, I have a couple of concerns:

    1. How long will it be free?
      How does their business model work if they are not charging the sender or the receiver the 2% to 3% charged by Visa/MC/et al?
    2. If it stays free, what happens to balances due in case of bankruptcy?
      In a bankruptcy, monies you have on balance are virtually lost and customers/vendors won't let you off the hook should your payment be stuck in la-la land.
    3. How long will the credit card companies and banks allow what is substantially a cash-advance to be made without the cash-advance fee added to the transaction.
      PayPal said in the past that if your bank/credit card company adds a cash advance fee to a PayPal transaction PayPal will pay for the cash advance charge. That's not sustainable in the post-Dot-(no-in-)Com(e) era.
    4. What happens in case of a disputed charge, either against you as payer or payee?
    PayPal's a great idea, and I've only had positive experiences myself, but these concerns are hanging over my head.
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  5. Redundancy by titus-g · · Score: 2
    One thing to make absolutely sure of though when using any 3rd party money processor is to make sure you are getting a copy of all the information you need to ship (name, address, not cc info) before either they get sent to the payment service providers site, or your cgi hits the code to process the payment. DO NOT rely on them getting the info to you!

    I've used a few in the past and with 2 had serious problems, one of them messed up the file setup on their side, the other had a slow server that accepted the payment but then timed out, in both cases this resulted in people being billed and no one knowing who (until they emailed a few weeks later, none too happy.

    I'd admit I am probably partly to blame for this for actually trusting them (one was a large bank, the other one of the major players in the online CC business).

    What's with the doubleclick stuff btw, my comps think my server is doubleclick (and just about every other ad server in creation) and there seems to be some sort of redirect sending there when I accessed this article (probably an include or .js file), I only got here by clicking back fast... does this mean that before long we won't be able to access /. if we are ignoring doubleclick?

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