Hi,

I was just referred to 2checkout.com by Mr. Amazon...

Now, it looks really nice... But does anyone have any comments?...
I was thinking revEcom.com first... But they charge $30 per wire... bah... But my curent one is too expensive... See revEcom was VERY interesting - except for the $30 charge and that you cant MANUALLY bill....

Any input appreciated :D

This has been discussed before and this is my view:

I use 2checkout.com. They are good. Some features I miss is ability to give trial accounts ( start billing after say 7 days ) . Also their cart is not the best - what I need is for my customers to be able to mix recurring products with non-recurring products.

Therefore I have two times turned to Revecom ( using their sales email form ) asking about features like this but all I got was an autoresponder response. Therefore I would never consider them.

You might want to check out hostcharge.com. So far, I like it! Support is fairly fast and straightforward and you can put in all the info yourself. =)

Originally posted by TradeViceroy
You might want to check out hostcharge.com. So far, I like it! Support is fairly fast and straightforward and you can put in all the info yourself. =)

First of all, I don't think it is the best of ideas to get your customers credit card information and input them manually, it is a very big responsebility. It is also a lot more work.

Secondly, have you looked at HostCharge.com's fees and have you compared them to 2CheckOut.com's? HostCharge.com charged $0.75 + 4% on every transaction where 2CheckOut.com charges only 5.5% (which is really good if you're mostly charging monthly accounts. HostCharge.com charges you $10.00 per month for statement fee, at 2CheckOut.com this is free. HostCharge.com charges $15.00 to wire the money into your account, again 2CheckOut.com does this for free. I oculd go on and on..

There's one thing I can not compare (since I don't have any personal experience), that is how their service is, how reliable they are and if they have good uptime, etc.

We just signed up with 2CheckOut.com a few hours ago and so far they seem very good. Feel free to ask me again in a couple of weeks how things are with them.

Mr. Amazon:

First and foremost, 2checkout.com and hostcharge.com offer similar, but different services. With 2checkout.com, you have to create a cart for all your products, services, etc that you provide. This may be fine for some, but not everyone needs (or wants) a cart. Hostcharge.com allows a merchant to manually enter in credit card information like a restaurant does. This is a nice feature for people offering many different products or services that do not have a "set or planned amount".

Yes, gathering your customer's credit cards is a fairly large responsibility. However, if you are providing a web hosting service, you could consider gathering their credit card information "part of the territory". Let me explain. A person who runs a server must process new accounts, pay all related bills, provide support to clients, and update and patch the server whenever possible. If you can't do this, you really don't deserve to be charging a person's credit card (in any fashion) as that person is not responsible enough.

Now, every company charges a different fee. Some are geared toward charging on a monthly basis while others are better for 3 or more months worth of fees. Hostcharge.com ONLY charges $10.00 per month statement fee if you go over $100.00 worth in charges. If you're a WHT member, that fee is waived. Also, this is a standard practice for most processors of this sort.

Some banks charge a wire fee and the provider, hostcharge.com, can't get around it. However, checks are free and they usually only take about a week to arrive. One must think about the level of service offered vs. the cost. Some people may be willing to accept the $15.00 wire transfer for the amount of service offered by hostcharge.com.

Since our product is being talked about here, and one of our users brought it up, I believe I should further clarify a few things

- HostCharge is more like a merchant account than a thirdparty billing company

- We offer volume discounts, that is if you process a lot we waive the statement fee and lower your discount rate

- We also plan on supporting multi-currency billing in about a week.

- And like TradeViceory says, manual billing is good but you need to accept responsibility as well. But as a webhost security should come to you as a second nature :)

So if you look at us prudently you'll see that we offer great returns in the long term, so the extra fees are just worth it considering the wide variety of features we offer. Lastly we're thinking of opening a bank account which can support direct deposits in the USA that will get rid of the wire fee.

Regards,
Asher.

So far I am very happy with 2CheckOut.com. I specially love the fact that you can add your own header and footer and make the CC payment page look just like your own website.

Thumbs up for 2CheckOut.com
:agree::agree:

Will keep you posted if anything new and exciting happens.

TradeViceroy,

2checkout.com does not require the use of their (or any) cart. You can do all of your 'selling' and calculate a price on your site, and simply pass the amount to be billed (as well as your customer's information) in a string to 2checkout's secure payment processor site. The customer completes the charge there, without the need to put anything in a 'cart' on their site.

I have no experience with HostCharge, but after seeing ^Kyo post, I did a search here and found a few threads that concern me. This one in particular stands out:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31138&highlight=windows+private+label

Seeing how he 'attacked' some of his past clients for asking for help, and then participated in (or, as it looks, INITIATED) a very public 'pissing match' with a few of them shows an extreme lack of professionalism, and makes me just a bit concerned about trusting a company he is affiliated with with something as important as my credit card processing.

Originally posted by qdh
TradeViceroy,

2checkout.com does not require the use of their (or any) cart. You can do all of your 'selling' and calculate a price on your site, and simply pass the amount to be billed (as well as your customer's information) in a string to 2checkout's secure payment processor site. The customer completes the charge there, without the need to put anything in a 'cart' on their site.


But that doesn't work for recurring billing items, right?

Hi,

2checkout is OK, but does not give flexiblity as Paypal.com

We are using Paypal for our hosting and so far its GREAT.
Only drawback is we get selected international customers as Paypal is only Acepted in 39 countries.

We can create trial periods as long as we want, since the nature of our business, Trial periods need to modified from time to time and it just takes few min. by altering the code little bit and Bingo.

With 2Checkout profit margins get lowered as they charge higher per transaction fee. Paypal is cheap, thus higher profits.

Best solution is Paypal and merchant account interfaced with modernbill.com.

Best regards

Rupi

We use both 2checkout and PayPal, to offer our clients a choice.

To be honest, ASPCode.net, I don't know if you can set up a recurring billing by passing a parameter to 2checkout. I prefer to do all of my own pricing, and calculating, and simply pass the final amount on to 2checkout for processing. I use a 3rd party script to handle client management and billing, and simply invoice my clients on the recurring schedule that the choose when they sign up for a plan (monthy, quarterly, etc..). My 'invoice' Email to them includes the link to 2checkout, to process their payment.

We are happy with both, and have no complaints with either so far. By using both, we feel we can offer our clients a choice of payment methods. We've found that those that already have a PayPal account prefer to use PayPal, where those that don't are more comfortable with a 'credit card' transaction, not having to create an account with PayPal.

Originally posted by qdh
Seeing how he 'attacked' some of his past clients for asking for help, and then participated in (or, as it looks, INITIATED) a very public 'pissing match' with a few of them shows an extreme lack of professionalism, and makes me just a bit concerned about trusting a company he is affiliated with with something as important as my credit card processing. [/B]

QDH,

That was the past, this is the future. I'm no longer in hosting hence I dont get frustrating clients like that person I had the 'brawl' with in that particular thread, just FYI - he had attacked me first (off forums).

Our clients at HostCharge simply love the service and the customer support we provide and you can ask them if I'm professional or not.

As far as trusting our company goes you're implying something quite different and I dont want to get into an argument with you so I'll simply ignore your remark.


- Asher

2checkout is just great, they have provided us one of the best service and support we have ever seen.

Support requests have been handled professionaly and some major issues were sorted out by the CEO personally and in due time.

I highly recommend them :D

Can any of you link me to some shopping carts that work with 2checkout.com? Free ones are preferred, however I don't mind paying.

Here is a list from their site.
http://www.2checkout.com/third_party_shopping_carts.htm

Just also pitching in with how great 2checkout.com is.

Been using them for a couple of months, and they have been great so far :)

Just curious...what would be the main reason (or reasons) to use 2checkout instead of paypal?

The ability that people can pay you with a credit card WITHOUT having to register for a PayPal account.

Paypal is probably going to go under soon....a few states are filing law suits against them...more states may continue...someone posted about this a couple of days ago...

I wanted to get some links to shopping carts besides the ones listed on 2checkout.com...
If anyone know a good cart for 2checkout let me know...I need a real simple one...

Hi,

I live in New Zealand,

With 2checkout.com they say that they mail cheques (checks) for free, does any other nonUS account holders get that?

How long does it take to get and how easy is it to draw the cash at your local bank?

Cheers,

Callum Henderson

Uhm, I live in India and I prefer to wire my money, mainly because its fast, secure and there is no charge if the wire money exceeds $1200.

But normal processing time for an international check over here averages around 10-15 days.

Regards,

Varun Shoor

Originally posted by callumhender
Hi,

I live in New Zealand,

With 2checkout.com they say that they mail cheques (checks) for free, does any other nonUS account holders get that?

How long does it take to get and how easy is it to draw the cash at your local bank?

Cheers,

Callum Henderson

Note: The bank will probably charge you a rather large fee to pay a cheque in foreign currency into your account.

For example, me paying a USD cheque into my GBP bank account.

Originally posted by AhmedF
The ability that people can pay you with a credit card WITHOUT having to register for a PayPal account.

But the way PayPal does it now with the use of their shopping carts, the creation of a PayPal account by the customer is really incidental. If you don't have a paypal accont then you are presented with a standard cc entry screen. You put in your info and cc# to make payment for that specific item right on that screen and you are only told after that...oh by the way you now have a paypal account. So it seems to me the only real differences are:

1. PayPal is cheaper
2. PayPal has more features

Originally posted by ASPCode.net
This has been discussed before and this is my view:

I use 2checkout.com. They are good. Some features I miss is ability to give trial accounts ( start billing after say 7 days ) . Also their cart is not the best - what I need is for my customers to be able to mix recurring products with non-recurring products.

Therefore I have two times turned to Revecom ( using their sales email form ) asking about features like this but all I got was an autoresponder response. Therefore I would never consider them.

Hi,

"Discounts" are coming in the near future.

We have a script available to allow you mix recurring & non-recurring products.

Please email me if you'd like it.


TomD

tom@2checkout.com

Originally posted by TradeViceroy
Mr. Amazon:

First and foremost, 2checkout.com and hostcharge.com offer similar, but different services. With 2checkout.com, you have to create a cart for all your products, services, etc that you provide. This may be fine for some, but not everyone needs (or wants) a cart.
*snip*


Now, every company charges a different fee. Some are geared toward charging on a monthly basis while others are better for 3 or more months worth of fees. Hostcharge.com ONLY charges $10.00 per month statement fee if you go over $100.00 worth in charges. If you're a WHT member, that fee is waived. Also, this is a standard practice for most processors of this sort.

Some banks charge a wire fee and the provider, hostcharge.com, can't get around it. However, checks are free and they usually only take about a week to arrive. One must think about the level of service offered vs. the cost. Some people may be willing to accept the $15.00 wire transfer for the amount of service offered by hostcharge.com.

A few comments.

You can use "cut n paste" HTML links or even email invoices with our service, you are not restricted to using a Cart.

Our charges are upfront.
signup fee, transaction charge & sale %
no minimum/maximum fees
no minimum/maximum sale amounts
very little product restriction should you decide to 'branch out'
we currently eat the chargeback fee

Wire fees are $36.00 for a $1.00 wire.
but, for every $100.00, the wire fee drops by $3.00
(example. a $900.00 wire costs you only $9.00, a $1,200.00 wire costs you nothing)
a prudent businessperson would consider setting their release level to a point where the wire is "affordable" and "manageable" for their application.
Checks are checks, the postal service is not different for 1 company then it is for another.


TomD

tom@2checkout.com

Hi TomD,

Could you please check this URL out:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33790

I am still waiting for a reply in there. I want to start working on my billing system.