credit card services

cybercrone · 02-27-2001, 09:42 PM

I will be selling just a few items on my site and sales will be very small, so I don't want a credit card service that charges a monthly fee or a setup. I have looked into CCNow, which charges a straight 9% and no setup and no monthly charge, but they allow a single shipping charge per order. That is, it doesn't matter how many items are in the order or what the difference in weight is, you can only have one shipping charge. This is ABSURD. They say they are trying to remedy this situation but have run up against software problems. Their suggestions for solutions, like including shipping in the price of the item, are not practical for me.
The other one I thought was likely was PayPal, which has a 30 cents charge per sale plus a small percentage, I think it's 2.5%, but after I got it all set up I discovered that when a customer places an order they are required to open an account with PayPal. There are a lot of very neat features about this service but I don't like to be forced into anything and don't want my customers to be either.
Can't find anything else that seems likely and low-cost. Can't remember why iBill won't work, but it won't. Anyone have a low-cost cc service, other than these three, that they're happy with?
[This message has been edited by cybercrone (edited 02-27-01@9:45 pm)]

dank · 02-27-2001, 09:50 PM

PayPal doesn't require customers to set up an account, per se (except for international customers), they just do an incredibly poor job of explaining their system. You can accept payments from customers who are unauthorized, which basically means they haven't waited the 4 days or whatever for their bank account to be confirmed. If you don't require that step, it's really no different than editing credit card info through a regular merchant account.

I just figured out the other day that you actually have to request that the money in your account resulting from sales be paid to you... Here I was wondering what the heck their payment schedule is if you don't choose the daily sweep feature. Details.

Dan

Toni · 03-02-2001, 07:55 AM

Thanks, Dan. I'll reinstall PayPal and take another look at the pay form. I may have formed an impression too quickly when I ran a test purchase. My concern is that if I formed an impression that I (the pretend customer) had to open an account with them in order to make a purchase, my real customers may form the same impression, whether it is right or not.

dank · 03-02-2001, 10:28 AM

I agree completely.

Good service, but an even better example of how to succeed in spite of your best efforts to be a failure...

Dan

John Kennett · 03-02-2001, 10:36 AM

Another one that is worth a look is www.verza.com

They have no monthly charge, and their fees are quite reasonable. They even provide a shopping cart too!

John

dank · 03-02-2001, 10:47 AM

Looks good, except for some of those CC transaction fees, which I'd call anything but reasonable:

</font><font face="Courier" size="3">
Ticket from $ 3.75 to $ 9.99     19.0%
Ticket from $ 10.00 to $ 19.99   15.0%
Ticket from $ 20.00 to $ 75.00   12.0%
</font><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">

Dan

*Rich* · 03-02-2001, 01:15 PM

Another source for low-cost startup transaction processing is www.propay.com. I understand this is a relatively new startup so I'm not sure how successful their plan will be. Fees are similar to those for standard merchant accounts (3.5% + $0.35) and also allows payment forms of credit cards or checks. No membership is required on the buyer's part. They do have a $1,000 per month limit, but then anyone processing more than this per month should probably have a merchant account, anyway.

Rich

Toni · 03-02-2001, 02:21 PM

Thanks, folks, for your input. Verza won't work because the transaction fees are too high for my wee-margin products. Rich, I hadn't stumbled across ProPay so was glad to hear about them. But here's from their explanation of services for Web sales: "Just let your customers know that you can accept Visa and MasterCard payments and have them give their email address to you. Then you can initiate a request for payment (Web Pay) by email." I want the standard push-a-buy-button and go-to-the-credit-card-payment-form procedure. Sigh. I haven't had a chance to review PayPal again yet; I'll prolly stick with them OR use CCNow who say they are soon going to offer more options for shipping payments. Meantime I can set things up so the cost of each item includes shipping. Not ideal but no attractive options seemt to be emerging. Or offer my customers a choice between CCNow and PayPal! Why not? It's only a matter of putting up two buttons instead of one.

cherry · 03-02-2001, 04:39 PM

I'm in the exact same situation, trying to sell a small amount of goods. Right now my best bet is PayPal, but I'll check into ProPay-- I hadn't heard of them.

One thing I did stumble upon that seems useful in conjunction with PayPal is EmartCart ( http://www.emartcart.com ). They essentially allow you to set up a shopping cart interface that results in a PayPal payment, since PayPal doesn't allow you to do anything more than have a "buy me now" button for each item. EmartCart allows you to have different shipping costs per item and some other helpful features. You can choose to generate the HTML for their shopping cart pages or just insert a button with the correct code in where you want to (much better option if you're designing your own site).

Anyone know exactly how the PayPal feature works when someone isn't a registered user? If I end up going with this PayPal/EmartCart option, I'd like to be able to tell my customers they don't have to go through the process of registering with PayPal unless they want to.

Toni · 03-02-2001, 05:57 PM

Hi, folks...
.
After reading Cherry's message I went to emart.com and at first was very excited -- I don't know why there was nothing on PayPal's page (that I could see, anyway) about a shopping cart being available. As Dan has said, they don't seem to explain their services very well. So I was all ready to sign up and in pursuance of that objective I read the "important information" section and guess what, Dan and Cherry -- customers ARE required to sign up for a PayPal account in order to use the service, it says so explicitly -- my impression was correct after all. This is a big turnoff in my book. However, I think I'll go ahead and sign up for the shopping cart and pursue my prior idea -- I'll offer customers the option of choosing either PayPal or CCNow, and explain the drawbacks of each. These services are bound to evolve and get better as a result of feedback. If not, in the meantime competing services will emerge that compete by doing things better, we can count on it. The nice thing for all us small-time operators is that we don't have to invest anything and can change without hassle or cost when the options improve.