Merchant Accounts/Online CC processors

[LaLa]

Let's start a listing of service providers for our fellow wahms and wahm-to bes...



www.Propay.com is a merchant account solution that works great for small business wahms with low amount of CC processing. You process the cards yourself and start with a $1000 per month minimum that you can increase if you deposit a reserve.
Very easy to work with and good fees/pricing.

www.paypal.com is popular by many wahms and offers credit card processing solution and carts HOWEVER your customer does have to join paypal to pay (unless they are changing that?)

www.merchantseek.com
has $99 intro merchant accounts that look to be a good value

Cosco and Sam's Club both have affordable merchant account solutions.

www.ccnow.com is similar to paypal
but your customers don't have to register with ccnow, which is a plus. You can optomize your CCNow pages to have your colors and business name if you know a bit of html

[RomansMamma]

I use Wells Fargo Bank/Authorize.net. Prices vary. I love it.

[Night Owl]

I currently use 2checkout, but plan to switch to authorize.net soon.

[gemanda]

I really like the Quickbooks Merchant Services...it's fairly inexpensive, and it allows me to control everything through Quickbooks, which I seem to live in anyway!

[mountaincaats]

CDGCommerce

Check out WebHostingTalk.com. Scroll down to E-commerce Discussion. There are several merchant account folks who frequent those boards there and in their signatures they offer promos. Look for cdgcommerce there. They reply often to questions people ask and they offer a really good promo. And they will treat you like a person and not another number. They are NOT a third party merchant account which is even better for security. The forum is really helpful and I have learned a lot at WHT.
webhostingtalk.com

[Leddie]

I use www.verisign.com It works pretty well and has been really reliable.

[HeatherSanders]

I have used and will again use www.securenetshop.com. They used to use Online Data as their Merchant, but I want to say that they use BluePay now. Either way, it was an all-encompassing one-shot gig ... you could pay monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annually for the shopping cart and then you pay your cc fees.

I compared it at the point I got in and it was a great rate for accepting AMEX, VISA, MC and DISC, no application fee and a set-up fee of $149.00 for the whole kit and kaboodle.

[Knittin' in the Shade]

wanted to add htat customers no longer have to be paypal members to use c with them. THey are basically a merchant account now. TH eonly hit is that if someone pays with a cc and doesn't have an account, fi you need to do any sort of partial refund you can't. You can do full refunds, but no partials.

[NathansMommy]

For Canadians, I highly recommend www.internetsecure.com. I have a few merchant accounts with them, and they're great!

[POOHPOT]

Merchant accounts

I currently use New Merchant Services. They do my webhosting, they have shown me how to use drop-shippers, everything. I have had a great success with them. They even do free training. I am able to except all the 4 major credit card and all. I am telling you it is so wonderful to find a company that will work with mothers and parents that want to stay at home with their kids. They are so personal with you and really care about your success with their company. I just can not say enough about them. I have two links to them if anyone is interested. boy: girl: girl: girl: girl: girl: :

[HBMMonica]

I used to use http://www.paynetsystems.com to process credit cards and I don't have any complaints!

[odilly]

You don't need a merchant account to process CC on-line. If you want to process CC on-line than it's cheaper to get started with Paypal.
If you want to process CC via phone or accept CC directly from your customer (if you have a real store) than you need merchan account. Merchant accounts can be VERY costly.

[msinfo]

Though Paypal is a good option we have gotten alot of good reviews on the Touch-Pay mobile touch-tone system (offered by Thompson Merchant Services) since we started featuring their services. They have really good options including an all in one solution similar to ProPay which includes the Virtual Terminal ability to accept credit cards from your website as well (from what I've heard from merchants this is very difficult to make with with ProPay). Also, their overall fee is lower than Propay's because they now have an only 2.19% rate, including online reporting and paper statements (Propay charges extra for those).

Here's a link to their Touch-Pay mobile.touch-tone solution
http://www.thompsonmerchant.com/serv...Touch-Pay.html

And here's a link to their online solution (which includes Touch-Tone capability at no extra charge):
http://www.thompsonmerchant.com/serv...xCommerce.html


C. Hodge
www.merchantseek.com
Your Payment Acceptance Source

[kokonutmama]

Personally, I can only speak for ecommerce home bizzes.

I think what odilly says is true, you don't need a merchant account to get started, I think PayPal is a good choice for an internet merchant just opening up, customers can use ccs without signing up with website payments standard api and the right shopping cart (zen, etc work fine)

At a certain point, though, you want to look more professional, avoid the confusion caused by customers not realizing that they can use their cc through paypal, and take orders over the phone for folks who are either nervous about putting their info over the internet or want to arrange special orders and whatnot. None of this "OK, that sounds good, I'll send you a paypal or google checkout email so you can pay me."

I use merchant warehouse and authorize.net. I shopped around a fair bit before settling on MW, they really have a good deal. Taking AmEx is a little extra, but discover is included. Authroize.net is pretty universal, so if I ever do change shopping carts (again) there's a good chance it'll be equipped for authorize.

[cafechi]

if you don't feel like using paypal, there's google checkout now, which is more of a merchant processor than paypal in that they send money directly to your account in a few days whereas paypal leave it there til you move it.

google is also cheaper than paypal.

[kellykins]

Can I tell you guys just how much I love MDC? :
I was all set to sign up with Paypal, and had that - hmmm... I bet there is something cheaper/better/more professional out there.

Thanks!!! Nothing useful to add, just a thankyou!