Good commission-based CC acceptor??

[Guest]

I have a small website that sells ebooks, and i was looking to an alternate way to accept payments which has no activation or monthly costs, and is just commission-based (like paypal)

2checkout has a 50$ activation fee, other services charge 5$ for every billing, which is obviously not suitable for me

Anyone has an easy answer to an easy question? =)

[wizardsandwars]

For very small businesses, nothing even remotely close to as cheap as paypal. All other third party, commission based solutions are much more expensive.

 

If you dont mind processing all of your transaction by hand, you can give propay.com a try. They don't offer a gateway, you have to enter each transaction manually into a virtual terminal, and they are more expensive than paypal, but they are a better alternative than 2checkout, for sure. Also, there's one called paysystems.com, which never seemed to get very popular, but they have reasonable rates, although till higher than paypal.

 

The bottom line though, is that once you get to the point where you are processing more than $1000 per month, you need to get your own merchant account and payment gateway.

[Guest]

For very small businesses, nothing even remotely close to as cheap as paypal. All other third party, commission based solutions are much more expensive.

 

If you dont mind processing all of your transaction by hand, you can give propay.com a try. They don't offer a gateway, you have to enter each transaction manually into a virtual terminal, and they are more expensive than paypal, but they are a better alternative than 2checkout, for sure. Also, there's one called paysystems.com, which never seemed to get very popular, but they have reasonable rates, although till higher than paypal.

 

The bottom line though, is that once you get to the point where you are processing more than $1000 per month, you need to get your own merchant account and payment gateway.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Thanks for the quick answer =)

[Jumping Rabbit]

Free setup and commission based, Paysat.com and Stormpay.com

 

Some googling around will probably find you some more alternatives too.

[wizardsandwars]

yup, and if you thought paypal was bad, get a load of this....

 

StormPay

6.9% plus 69 cents

 

PaySat is a little more digestable at

5.3% of the order amount plus 0.39$ per order

[Jumping Rabbit]

yup, and if you thought paypal was bad, get a load of this....

 

StormPay

6.9% plus 69 cents

 

PaySat is a little more digestable at

5.3% of the order amount plus 0.39$ per order

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Kinda steep, yes....

 

But since the main concern asked for seemed to be not setup and/or monthly cost, thats what you will have to deal with since most 3pp will have substantial higher rates that utilizing your own merchant account and a payment gateway. (The exception is paypal which actually is quite cheap)

 

So if you dont want to/can not use paypal or just want an alternative credit card processor in addition to paypal, and dont want to pay any setup or monthly fees, the discount rate will usually be quite high.

 

I have seen up to 15%, belive it or not.... :D

Edited June 7, 2005 by Jumping Rabbit

[Dacotah]

Another little tidbit of info regarding PayPal is this... get the debit card and use that for your expenses. Then start an E-Bay account and sell something once every three weeks. It doesn't have to be much.

 

Now you will receive 1.5% cash on all purchases made with the debit card and if you are using it to pay your supplier your cash rebate will be significant.

 

My PayPal rate is 2.2% and everything we buy from our supplier goes onto the PayPal debit card thereby reducing each transaction cost to under 1%.

 

Now for my own dilema, we're processing over $10k a month and I know I should get another gateway but I just can't let go of that <1% transaction cost. Plus I know if I add another I suspect over 50% of our sales will go to that payment process...I've heard it's about 70%. I suppose some could be made up with extra sales but I just don't know.

 

Thoughts? Recommendations?

[wizardsandwars]

Yes, you will definatly pick up a decent percentage of sales if you offer a payment processor in addition to paypal. We were in a similar situation a couple years ago, we were getting alot of complaints from people that either didn't like paypal, or didn't want to be re-directed off our site to make payment. We decided to add a second payment method, and when we did, our sales just about doubled.

 

Paypal has made a few improvements since then, such as the ability to purchase through them without creating a paypal account, and allowing a more customizable paypal checkout page (co-brand logo, background colors, text color, etc..), and the press about paypal isn't nearly as bad as it was before eBay purchased them. However, iwould still strongly suspect that you'll get a boost if you add an additional payment method.

[Dacotah]

Thanks Chris. That confirms what I have been thinking, so last evening I bought an SSL cert and plan to get that up and running next which will give me a little more leway in deciding who to go with, plus it's a good idea anyway.