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eCommerce Alternatives for Credit Card Processing?
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?"
Oh *come on* - yes rembours is popular, but it's still a PITA, especially here in sweden where you have to go to the post office to pay!
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 merchandise? I didn't think so. I have, and trust me, you'd never pay someone over the 'net that way again if you had.
Why would an American small-to-medium business want to deal with foreign customers? (A company large enough to not be a member of the SMB class wouldn't be posting here asking for ecomm advice. ;))
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 barrier complication possible
The only other country that is of much interest to the small business owners I know here in the US is Canada because the barrier to entry for that market is just low enough to make it practical. For the most of them, however, the marginal gains and marginal costs associated with trying to leave the American economic base are simply not practical. There's a lot of "headroom" to grow in our economy before it becomes a requirement to expand abroad to maintain growth.
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