Merchant Services

[fisicx]

I'm embarking on a new project which is going to need merchant services. We have had a good look around and they all seem very similar, prices vary but that is less important than site integration and reliability.

Does anybody have any recommendation for online merchant services? We do not need a shop just a means of making payments.

[tkessex]

I'd have thought World Pay would be the obvious choice, though I hear HSBC offer an extremely good package (but as their customer services has always been dire in my experience, they may not be the way to go).

[peterjhale]

Well, if you can you've GOT to get a merchant account and integrate through something like PROTX

The charges are SO much lower than the likes of Worldpay or PayPal.

But, PayPal is a great solution because you can set it up straight away and there are no huge fees to begin with (unlike Worldpay)

I think WP fees are over 4% for credit cards whereas a merchant account should be well below 2% - and that can add up.

PayPal and WP are probably much easier and faster to integrate than something like Protx and your merchant account - but worth it in the long run (plus banks probably have tougher fraud prevention...) For example I have just integrated Protx with a Barclays merchant account and it's probably taken me over 3 months (from the time I telephoned Barclays to ask for a merchant account....)

[TWD-Tony]

Be aware that WP keep your money for a lot longer than the others (over 6 weeks I believe) before you can withdraw it.

Paypal withdrawls hit your account in approx 5 days, the charges arn't to bad but the image is less than perfect.

Protx is the chosen payment provider for a lot of my clients - most having switched from WP because of the payment waiting issue.

Nochex is another easy setup option with charges similar to paypal.

It's horses for courses really, how much messing about vs image and charges.

[fisicx]

Thanks for your advice. The client doesn't want to use paypay or worldpay. There already have a merchant account with their bank to all we need to do is integrate the merchant services into the website.

I've been looking at web-merchant.co.uk, they seem to do exactly what we want but we will have a look at protx.

[peterjhale]

Protx is used by most of the major online merchants - it's fairly easy to integrate (just our shopping cart software was out of date otherwise we'd finish it earlier)