Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. wrote: > Relating to this, please can someone recommend a good payment gateway > to use for credit card transactions. Also I am getting mixed messages > regarding the setup of a merchant account.
Your options are: - Use someone-else's merchant account. Eg use PayPal, Worldpay, Google Checkout (not yet in the UK but coming soon; only just launched in US), etc. - Use your own offline merchant account (eg payment terminal in your highstreet shop) and a payment gateway to take the online payments securely for you to process offline. If you do that we recommend SecureHosting.com simply because we know the guys there and have worked with (and for) them in the past. - Use your own online merchant account, ie your website interacts directly with your merchant (eg HSBC) and you get realtime processing. At present HSBC seem to be about the cheapest if you want your own online account. The prices we were quoted recently were the same for online or offline, so the intermediate option becomes pointless (an extra hurdle at extra cost for no benefit). I daresay HSBC quote everybody a different price, though, and we have had an offline merchant with them for some time. Don't forget you will also need security certificates etc for your website if you choose the third option. (The other options tend to redirect to the third parties secure site.) Of the first lot, Worldpay is pretty good but not cheap, PayPal is a nightmare and not cheap (IMHO!). Google looks interesting when it is launched and if you are paying for AdWords can be very cheap (they give you $10 of "free" CC transactions for every $1 you spend on adwords). All are pretty easy to interface to (its in their interests!). Something like osC or Zencart will have plugins for all the major options. If you want to accept Amex then it all gets more complicated (so I don't do it!). PayPal is probably the easiest option then. -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555 _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
