What other options are their for taking payments online, without having all those messy time consuming and costly merchant accounts?
We take some payments via paypal, and are looking at alternatives, looking at perhaps £300 a month in total sales, so not enough to warrant huge ecommerce systems.
Merchant accounts are not so expensive if you have quite a few orders being placed, £100 (ish) set up cost with streamline then PROTX at £20 per month, 35p per transaction on debit cards and 1.8% (ish) on credit cards.
Although maybe not worth it on £300 a month, however, if your business grows then worth looking at.
PayPal Pro will allow you to take Credit & Debit Card payments on your own site (needs some integration, which they provide the details for).
£20pm fee (free until October 2008), and transaction fees of 3.4% + £0.20 per transaction for Total Monthly Sales of £0.00 GBP - £1,500.00 GBP (less for higher monthly trading volumes).
Works well for us - maybe not the cheapest, but easy and convenient.
Google Checkout is quick and reliable, and if you advertise with Adwords, yuo may not have to pay fees (depending on adwords spend).
The other benefit of Google Checkout is that the money appears in your account 3-5 days later automatically, unlike paypal where you have to withdraw money at any given time.
I'll echo Nikki's comments - we've just started using Google Checkout for our Network Midlands business and it's cheaper, faster and slightly less hassle than PayPal.
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Trevor Wood Redline Digital Services website development, business continuity planning and disaster recovery Network Midlands business networking events and corporate event management
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Don't customers have to be signed-up already to pay?
Without going though a full checkout procedure I can't give the definitive answer, but trying one shop, Google checkout had me logged in with my Google account name which hasn't got a Checkout account added to it. It looked like it would just take a credit card at this point.
Perhaps you have to have a Google account
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Trevor Wood Redline Digital Services website development, business continuity planning and disaster recovery Network Midlands business networking events and corporate event management
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Look into google checkout as well.
I don't use adwords, I never really liked them and other courier companies brag at our regular drink ups how many clickthroughs they have done other ads... they all pretend it's just DHL they do it to, but I can't help but think they are telling me fibs....
other courier companies brag at our regular drink ups how many clickthroughs they have done other ads
Google are very hot on this - they can spot if someone is regularly & frequently clicking on an ad. If they find this - or you suspect that someone is doing it to run up your adwords bill - they will investigate and refund if necessary.
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Trevor Wood Redline Digital Services website development, business continuity planning and disaster recovery Network Midlands business networking events and corporate event management
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We've been using Protx and a Barclaycard merchant account since we started up, but Google Checkout seems to be a good option for low volumes. It also depends on your industry and what your clients accept - when we started out PayPal and Worldpay were the only realistic other options and Worldpay were too expensive and kept the card details and PayPal kept the card details and left an unprofessional image.
I never liked Worldpay - i used to use them about 6-7 years ago when I ran a domain registration company (I sold it as it was too much hassle!) and Worldpay were constantly getting things wrong and allowing fraudulent transactions through, then clawing the money back.
i think Paypal is getting over the stigma it has had, and Google Checkout has the google name behind it so has a bit of a start. I use Checkout and Paypal as of a few weeks ago, so will have to keep an eye on it and see which one people use most.
This is a very timely thread for me, I have been thinking today about taking payments online, rather than taking cash or cheques. I can tap into the impulse buy online purchases now
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Phil
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I went with Paypal originally as I'd been using it personally for yrs. But have started the process of getting Google Checkout and possibly NoChex too, in place simply to give people as many options as they want. After all different potential customers have different preferences on how they like to pay.
Glad to see Google Checkout gets good reviews as I'm thinking of setting this up on my website instead of Paypal due to the fees being cheaper.
Cheers everyone
I wouldn't discard Paypal, I'd use both so that the user has an option.
I happen to like buying and selling using Paypal and seeing as millions of people use it - it should remain a payment possibility.
regards
James.
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I have set up sites with PROTX, Paypal, Google checkout and HSBC e-payments.
The HSBC is a full on merchant account, there is a lot of code that needs to be added to the site to make it all work, the documentation is good, but there are pages and pages of it. You have to be able to host HTTPS certificates on your site for this to be viable.
I have looked into Lloyds and Natwest FastPay but both seemed difficult to talk the banks about as my clients volume were too low.
PROTX is a merchant account as well albeit smaller (you can have multiple currencies too), you add their code to your site and the details are passed to them for processing, no HTTPS certificate is needed here though.
Google and Paypal are for great, they require little technical knowledge and can be implemented pretty easily.
If you are after a quick and easy setup go for Google (I am personally going away from Paypal because unless the person paying ahs signed up for the instant payment option it can take days and days for the payment to clear).
If you do go down the google route, remember to have a look at Froogleand/or google base - add your products in there as well!
PLEASE NOTE: There are some downloadable stores available that store the card details within the store itself, this is okay if you aer 100% sure the data is safe and no one can access it, if you are going to host your store on a shared server or on a PC in your house, be careful, you have no control over the server access to your (and your clients data).
Make sure the host (or your own interent connection) has a standalone firewall installed and the data in the Database is encrypted.
Sorry for the scary moment, but a guy I met a few months ago got hacked
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Is paypal the only option?
from Sarah
Thanks
