Finding the Right Online Credit Card Merchant?

quark2universe asks: "In the world of e-commerce, there are many vendors who offer credit card merchant accounts as gateways to the financial world and there are many factors in determining which one to choose. How much is the setup fee/monthly cost/transaction fee? How robust is the API? Which ones will be around in 1-2 years? How secure are they and do they protect the consumers privacy?"

"I have personally used Cybercash and Ibill for business to consumer type of online transactions and have successfully brought these into production use, but I am about to start a new project where this decision will be needed and would like to know... Which online merchant do you use and why? Also, which merchants do the major players (Amazon, et al) use?

Please spare me the hype about B-2-B and the 2/5/7 trillion dollar industry that it will become. It may become a big deal, but you can bet that the major companies are the ones who will be landing these types of contracts, not you and me. I still think the B-2-C industry is viable and there are many facets that have yet to be explored. There are opportunities for individuals and small companies to "merchantize" Web sites, as long as it is not prohibitively expensive from the online credit card merchant."

Comments

Various options

[rjwoodhead]

If you're accepting credit cards online, you basically have 3 options:

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