Any Advice on Merchant Account Providers?

[mariosj]

Hi there,

I'm almost coming to the end of creating my online store and I need to decide who to go with regards to accepting credit card payments.

Because we are a new business, we cannot go directly to our bank so they cannot help us so we have to go with a third party merchant provider.

I don't want to go down the Paypal route as I personaly get put off by having to register before I can purchase anything.

I've looked at a few others like Worldpay who take 4 weeks to pay you and Chronopay.

I was gonna go with a company called Web Merchant but when it came to registering with them they told me that Actinic isn't compatible with their system of payment.

Anyway, can anyone suggest any other companies I could look at.
Maybe Durango?

Any advice would be welcome.:)

Thanx!!

[Ali00001]

Hi there,

We had the same problem, with the bank route not open to us as we were too new.

We went with Paypal Pro. It has been great so far. £20 per month, no set up fee. It gives you a checkout that is part of your website, so people are not paying through Paypal, but actually paying on your website with their credit card. It works fine with Actinic Express (almost all the time!). The payment goes straight into your Paypal account so you have to transfer it out which takes ages, but as a start-up system for a year or so it is a great solution.

[pinbrook]

I don't want to go down the Paypal route as I personaly get put off by having to register before I can purchase anything.

I've looked at a few others like Worldpay who take 4 weeks to pay you and Chronopay.

I was gonna go with a company called Web Merchant but when it came to registering with them they told me that Actinic isn't compatible with their system of payment.

Anyway, can anyone suggest any other companies I could look at.
Maybe Durango?

Paypal has changes recently in as far as you do not requre an acct with them to buy.

Neither Durango or Chronopay are Actinic compatible, same as WebMerchant.

So if you can't get your bank to give you merchant status you are left with Worldpay or PayPalPro.

PaypalPro requires 8.5.1.

as Ali says PPP is a good solution for a start up, its downside is its perceived links to ebay and the fact some people think you need a PP acct.

WP has more credibility but will cost you more and you have the 28 day delay (which in my view shouldn't be a hinderance to a business with decent cash flow)

[Ali00001]

PaypalPro requires 8.5.1.

It works fine with Actinic Express.


as Ali says PPP is a good solution for a start up, its downside is its perceived links to ebay and the fact some people think you need a PP acct.

WP has more credibility but will cost you more and you have the 28 day delay (which in my view shouldn't be a hinderance to a business with decent cash flow)

PayPal works completely behind the scenes on your website - it can't have perceived links with eBay as the customer doesn't know they are paying through PayPal Pro, all they see is the secure credit card payment screen on your website, they don't know which Payment Service Provider you are using.

And as for the last comment - how many start up businesses do you know that have decent cash flow? The 28 day thing does matter, as do the fees. We looked into Worldpay, I know it has good credibility but £200 set up fee, £189 initial 6mth fee, then £30 per mth on top. . . that would have crippled us in the beginning!

PayPal Pro also has a Virtual Terminal thingy so that you can take Credit Card payments over the phone which has been really useful on a few occasions. And when I said it takes ages to transfer your money out, it takes about 5 days which is long enough when you are a start up business with painfully tight cashflow!

Everyone slags PayPal Pro off because of its connections with PayPal. I can understand that as PayPal are a law unto themselves and I don't expect we will be with them any longer than we have to be, but I do wish people would look into it before telling others that they shouldn't consider them.

[pinbrook]

Oh Dear, I'm being accused of saying stuff I'm not saying again...

Yep I got it wrong when i said PPP requires 8.5.1 I didn't notice I was in the express forum. PPP works with both 8.5.1 and express.

PayPal works completely behind the scenes on your website - it can't have perceived links with eBay as the customer doesn't know they are paying through PayPal Pro, I've attached an image to this post from Ail's own checkout showing the paypal logo stating payments are via PP.

but I do wish people would look into it before telling others that they shouldn't consider them. I did not say do not use them, I said as Ali says PPP is a good solution for a start up

[Ali00001]

The image you have attached is of the PayPal payment button. Customers do not pay through this unless they have a Paypal account. It is really, really annoying that if I want to give customers the option to pay by Paypal that PayPal then stick that button under the shopping cart. I have asked for it to be removed but Actinic are bowing down to the force of Paypal and letting it stay. I think it did really confuse people to begin with (so it is not just you Jo!) but I then put lots of payment info on our front page and most people pay by credit card now, with just a few using this button. If they want to pay by Credit Card they continue and choose "Pay by Credit or Debit Card" and then they get to the page I have attached (hope you can open it!). As I hope you will be able to see, there is no mention of Paypal there at all.

[mariosj]

Thanks Ali & Jo,

I will certainly look down the new and improved Paypal route.
I too buy and sell with Paypal and the thought of a potential customer having to go through the motions of creating a Paypal account then transfering funds blah blah blah really puts me off personaly especially when you are dealing with impulsive buyers who want to buy there and then.

I agree with Ali regarding the cashflow issue, 4 weeks wait can seriously cripple you especially when you have to restock and are waiting funds before being able to do anything.

Other companies I looked at were Paylane, Netbanx and Fasthost, but when I did a comparison chart I found Webmerchant were the best of the bunch, but alas they are out of the equation.


I know that in the States they have so many to choose from, but here we are so limited.

Let's see what Paypal Pro says......

[Nappyman]

Hi there, just thought i would shove my two penneth into the debate. Firstly would like to say our business has just turned one year old and cashflow still an issue, and i can see it will be for a while yet, nothing to be ashamed of, we are just using profit to increase the size of our business organically rather than running to a bank manager to subsise us!

As for PP, well when we started a very basic web store, we used the pp integration and the buttons which come with the code, this got us off the ground and it got us a ready made merchant. We also sell hell of a lot through ebay and this suited us at the time.

We then went through a little fraudulent activity with paypal and discovered to our horror that they are extremely biased toward protecting the buyer to the detrement of the seller, even if the seller does things right and still gets caught out.

When this went on we set up a account with nochex hoping they would ad a little more credibility and loom less paypal like on the payment screen.

Then we watched watchdog... oh lord!!

I am now looking at integrating paypal pro into the website as just moved up to 8.5.1 and we will always keep paypal as a lot of people use it and a lot of customers have moved over from ebay to our store hence we need to be loyal to what they traditionally use to pay. We also have to be a lot more carefull verifying who we are sending good to.

I have joined the chorus with regard to Google and we are biting the bullit and going down the streamline and protx route, but will never do away with Paypal as it is a blinking good way to start online trading and a lot of people use it, just make sure everything is right when people are buying as accounts do get hijacked. If you are using it purely for cc processing then it looks a little amatuer on the payment page, but i am hoping paypaol pro might resolve that once i have worked out what the heck i am doing with it!

Lloyd
www.nappies-direct.com

[cdicken]

I have asked for it to be removed but Actinic are bowing down to the force of Paypal and letting it stay.Unfortunately, if we removed that button, we would violate the PayPal terms and conditions (https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/ua/PolicyPaymtProTermsPop-outside) (look under 'Section 4 - Usage of Express Checkout')

[Ali00001]

Typical Paypal. They love to throw their weight around, don't they? Let's hope Google Checkout makes them think twice about this kind of thing. Or maybe the extra competition will make them try even more underhand methods to get people into Paypal . . . ?

I still think that Actinic should be making the effort not to let them win on this one though. I think I suggested on another post that we could have payment buttons for other methods of payment right beside the PayPal one. Or at the very least some text telling customers that they can pay by other methods if they continue with their address details. Leaving it as it is makes it confusing (as demonstrated in the post above!) and unprofessional.

The next item in the Terms and Conditions says:
The PayPal logo must be displayed with equal prominence as the logos for your other payment options.

At the moment PayPal are getting more than they deserve on this one - their logo is displayed first and foremost with no other competition from other payment methods anywhere near it. That is not "equal prominence".

Please, please think on this one Actinic folks. There must be a way not to let PayPal get away with whatever they want.

[mariosj]

Just out of curiousity, why can't Actinic be used in conjunction with Webmerchant?

When I spoke to them recently they told me that Actinic seems to be 'a law unto themselves' and don't want to play ball.

Any reason you would like to share with us?

[pinbrook]

Actinic has an integration kit that WebMerchant could buy and implement if they chose to.

Actinic's policy is to wait for a PSP to approach them for the integration kit and not vias versa.

Maybe you could pressurise Webmerchant to talk to Actinic about this.

[Ratty]

I would regard paypal as a payment method of last resort.

Please consider having a non-online payment process.

Actinic will securely store the card details.

You can then run them yourself through your desftop pdq machine.

This has 1 disadvantage - it takes 10 seconds of your time to manually process orders

These advantages:

You get the money into your account within 8 working hours
Its significantly cheaper to set up a standard merchant account with any of the high-street banks rather than an online provider
If someone phones an order its no hassle
If you're out of stock of something or you dont want to p[rocess the order for whatever reason you can email the customer and tell them and not process the order, rather than having it automatically processed and then refund them (which means that you are out of pocket as refunds go through immediately, and the customer gets mucked about)
If the customer knows a real human is processing their order they tend to prefer it than a computer.

Unless your business is ebay based, please dont use paypal. I learned the hard way.

[Ali00001]

Hi
We weren't talking about using Paypal - but Paypal Pro. It allows your customers to pay by Credit Card on your website without any mention of PayPal. Paypal just act as a Payment Service Provider. Unfortunately, when you use it you also have to offer (or push as discussed above) normal Paypal.

It costs hundreds of pounds in setup fees to set up a Merchant Account. Paypal Pro has no setup fee. When customers phone through an order it is no hassle with Pro either!

More importantly, as mentioned in the original post, banks will often not give new businesses a Merchant Account, which is the main point here. We are talking about a start-up stop-gap Credit Card processing service that will allow us to take cards for our first couple of years until the banks will give us the time of day.

Also, I have to disagree with your last point. Personally I DO NOT want a human being looking at my credit card details. Human beings steal credit card details and use them to buy DVD players or write them down and lose the bit of paper, computers do not.

Getting payments into your bank account in 8 hours is brilliant and your point about the payment not going through until the order is finalised is a good one as doing refunds sometimes gets complicated.

As I have said before, we will be getting a merchant account in the future. We can't just now and as far as I can see at the moment Pro is the best solution for us . . . apart from that damn button . . .

[aisha]

Hi I'm completely new here. Hi
No one has mentioned ProTX, doesn't that work with Express?

Can I just clarify, PayPalPro is different to PayPal from what has been said. Is it correct to say that the user doesn't see that its a version of PayPal? It sounds as if there is a logo displayed somewhere?

Sorry Hope these questions aren't obvious.
Thanks

[pinbrook]

Can I just clarify, PayPalPro is different to PayPal from what has been said. Is it correct to say that the user doesn't see that its a version of PayPal? It sounds as if there is a logo displayed somewhere? PP Pro is different to PP. and yes there is a paypal logo forcibly displayed within the site if you use PP/PPP.

I suspect Express works with Protx. Why don'y you phone Sales with your list of requirements? in fact a quick look at the Actinic express webpages confirms Protx is integrated

http://www.actinicexpress.co.uk/overview/asp-shopping-cart.htm

[BRAD_UK]

Hi all,

Just like Ali I use Paypal Pro and to be fair I am pretty happy with it. I was one of the first to start the trial which was probably about 9 months ago and when you get in running with Actinic it saves me much time that people can buy off my website without being re-directed and the money goes straight into my Paypal account. The fees arent too bad either but then I only get about 50-100 orders a week in my busy times so it depends on your volume. I would recommend it for start up companies as you dont need to go through with Banks and pay high set ups and often you need long trading accounts / histories.

I have had a few problems over the 9 months but on the hole it has worked very well.

Also just want to say that Paypal put me as a seller on their big Grand Giveaway promotion where they were giving away a £1000 every day for a month or so and someone actualy won off my website ! Lucky person only spent £30 buying a cheap baseball bat aswell !

Bradley Jones
The Baseball and Softball Shop
www.baseballandsoftball.co.uk
http://www.baseballandsoftball.co.uk