I've been approved by Barclays for a merchant account and the setup fee is £250 which is slightly on the high side. I spoke to them a few days ago and they said they could offer a slightly reduced fee if I was not trading from home. Hmmm.. What do you think constitutes trading from home? I'm in the process of building a seperate studio/office space onto my house. Could this be construed as being seperate, even though the address is the same? How could they even determine my trading address if I'm a sole trader and not registered with companies house. ie, it's quite conceivable to change office space regularly. I'm not suggesting giving false information or anything, however I'm curious about how they varify a trading address.

Just pay the £250, its not a high fee for a good quality merchant system.

I think we paid more than that for our HSBC stuff, but its the best move we ever made (away from paysystems).

LOL! you make a fair point, but money is unbelievably scarce at the moment, particularly after paysystems etc. Bank of Scotland only want £150 for a merchant account and that's about as much as I could comfortably afford for a setup fee. I'll speak to Barclays about the criteria they use for a business location next week, but I thought I'd ask here 1st for some thoughts.

But you should find a much much lower overall cost when comparing the transaction costs with paysystems.

I know we spent a few hundred on our direct merchant account with our bank HSBC but per transaction charges are over 50% less than paysystems. So its a long term gain. Not to mention the stability of a proper account over the jokers at paysystems ;)

EFUNC after our dismaying treatment by Worldpay we are having Barclays EPCQ LITE Merchants services.We would have liked to have had the integrated service where the customer pays themselves online but for that we needed extra encrypted software so we opted for the new LITE service,This is a full merchants account but only we can put the details in.These can be sent by e mail or phoned in.We do not have to have the dreadful shopping carts either.
Don't grumble at their fees as they are a fraction of Worldpays.They charge £250 set up and thats all,no sneaky WORLDPAY demands of £1000's 2 days later AFTER receiving our money.
We are paying £20 monthly by direct debit,the transaction costs are 4.64% for all credit cards from any country, but only 38GB pence per transaction on debit cards like Switch and Connect.So we will pick up more sales from being able to process the latter now.There is no ceiling on high or low sales.
We can be paid daily or weekly.We plumped for weekly. Also we get to use the Barclays Logo, and after all Barclays comes in the top 5 most trusted banks in the World.

Paysystems isn't even on the radar. I was primarily looking at Bank of Scotland and Barclays:

Barclays merchant account:
£250
5.24%
35p

Bank of Scotland
£150 setup
2.8% transaction discount
40p debit card

Just as an aside, i don't find transaction rates to be any cheaper than PS once you've added the additional 1.9% gateway charge. maybe HSBC is much cheaper.

We've got about 2.6% with HSBC, but I think that was negotiated on our volume.

We're then using ProtX for our gateway which is 10p per transaction. Very cheap and very nicely integrated already!

getting back to this trading from home stuff; if you've declared part of your house as being business premises and built an office conversion/extension, is this still constituted as trading from home? what's the exact criteria to evaluate this? any other banks have any policies about this?