Hi Alex

A similar question was asked previously about credit card transaction providers - see http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/100674-who-is-best-agent-for-credit-card-transactions.html and scroll down to read the various replies in the thread.

There are some recommendations there.

Have you also considered an entire publishing platform which does all the content management, user management, payment processing etc. for you?

For example, I know Subhub (http://www.subhub.com) is about to launch with a one-stop proposition for niche online subscription sites. Or there are people like Magicalia (http://www.magicalia.com/) who run their own sites but also do content / commerce / community sites for a range of other brands.

Ashley

Hi Alex

I run an e-business consultancy and we regularly have to consider payment gateway service providers for our customers - different projects require different solutions.

For example, Worldpay is good for merchants that don’t know how many transactions they will actually get. (I’m talking about the basic Worldpay offering here, not their banking service). They charge a small setup fee and a small annual fee plus a fixed amount for debit card transactions but they charge a percentage on credit card transactions.

I seriously recommend Datacash. Not only are they very reliable and efficient (always consider the length of time it takes for the transaction cash to actually hit your merchant bank account), but they are also very hot on security. The other big plus is that you do not pay a percentage, you pay £100 per month for 1,000 transactions per month. But the downside is that you pay quite a big annual fee.

I tend to produce an algorithm to compare expected annual costs of payment gateway service providers using expected average sale price, number of sales and split between credit card and debit card transactions. You can then consider various scenarios like 'what happens if I achieve half the sales I expect to achieve' or 'what happens if all the transactions are made on credit card and none on debit card'? But don't forget to consider the cashflow, ie how long it takes for the money to get in your bank account.

I hope this helps.

David.

Hello Alex,

We operate an online retail business www.born2becool.com and have had experience of several 'solution' providers - including Pay Pal. Over the last 18 months we have moved away from Pay Pal and now use it exclusively for our eBay shop and stock clearance auctions. We spoke to our Bank (Lloyds TSB) and met with their e-comm payments adviser. We also consulted our e-commerce integrators (the techies) and have now switched to a CardNet/Protx solution. This has been (to date) excellent and we have noticed several business benefits since the change-over. First, lower abandonment rates. The customer account set-up and payment process is very slick. Second, we take approx. 45% of our orders via an 0845 number - using the Protx 'virtual terminal' (via a PC) is extremely quick and also allows 'off-line' sales to be processed and validated without the need for a retailer terminal (saving costs). The financial reports are easily accessed and simple to interpret. Finally, the monies reach the bank a damn sight quicker than Pay Pal - and you don't need to log-in to download as the payments are sent direct to the business account.

We also feel this system gives a professional 'feel' to the site - whereas other payment solutions can look & feel a bit clunky. Given all this the costs involved are (IMHO) well worth it.

Cheers.

On 10:37:20 24 January 2005 MrAlexKing wrote:

We publish a niche market offline publication and we have been using Paypal for our sins for taking payments. It has been very unstable so we looking into other options.

We have looked at Chronopay but for their 3rd party solution, which runs on a percentage of each transaction. But they only take dollar and euro

Does anyone know of any other options?

Thanks

Alex

The payment is only one element in the total transaction process, this is important that the processor should truely gear of e-commerce financial transactions flow in a secure, stable and reliable environment, secondly their charges should be obvious and affordable too.

For EU I would say www.chronopay.com can be a good alternate option they provide excellent service and support too.

Alex,

You can check  as well as an own merchant account with chronopay, they can also
offer you a virtual terminal at no extra costs. I think this can solve your problem.