Is there any other service out there that our website veteransflagdepot.us could use other than PayPal that anyone knows of?

Thanks and Happy New Year!

Tony

Welcome to the forums Tony!

Since you are based in the United States, you have hundreds of options available to you. If you are selling more than $1,000 a month, consider a merchant account. If not, you might want to take a look at 2CO.

I would recommend keeping paypal on there no matter what you choose, since a lot of military members have Paypal. Not too sure about Vets but I do know about the current military using them just because it is easy

The LinkPoint payment gateway is probably one of the strongest out there. It is owned by the First Data Corporation. First Data has been doing electronic money transfers since 1871 and they were the first processor of both VISA® and MasterCard® bank-issued credit cards in 1976. First Data processed 12.2 billion transactions in North America alone in 2003. LinkPoint charges are about $15-$30 a month with no extra transaction costs and no extra charges to use their recurring billing.

Authorize.net is probably the most advertised electronic gateway. A lot of people think they can sign up with them and immediately start to accept credit cards. They do not release you need a merchant account as well. Authorize.net even uses the First Data platform to help facilitate transaction processing. Authorizenet.com is usually about $20-$30 a month with a $,10 transaction fee (on top of what the Merchant Account Provider (MAP) will charge. Auth also charges $20-$25 a month to use their recurring billing features. Some companies give you 250 free transactions and charge you $.05 after that.

Verisign also has a payment gateway. Verisign is probably the most recognized name because they also offer other services and products for the internet (i.e. SSL certificates, domain registration, hosting, etc). You do not need to purchase everything from Verisign to have a successful e-commerce business. Verisign is about $20-$80 a month. They give you 1,000 transactions a month and then charge about $.10 per transaction. Recurring billing is about $30 a month

Thank you very much for the information. I will look into all of these and see which would best fit our needs.

We will keep PayPal. :)

Thanks again and have a great day.

Tony

Anytime.

Just keep in mind the things that I listed are gateways - not merchant account providers (MAPs). You will need both to fully accept credit cards on your website. Think of the gateway as the same thing basically as the POS terminal in the commissary. It connects your website to First Data, Visanet, etc to help verify the transaction.

guess I should make a suggestion also; i've been using ikobo for a while now and it works alright. it's got shopping cart and it's third party merchant account... which means you won't have to use a gateway (unless you want to). hope i could help...

Good morning and thank you for your reply.
I will look into ikobo and see waht they offer.

Thanks again and have a great day.

Tony

I would not use Ikobo Tony. They have had serious problems with their network, spamming, as well as on-again - off-again problems with MasterCard

Good morning Corey, I just read the thread relating to those problem and thanks for the info.

In the past we used Stormpay but they froze our account and ripped us off for over $600.00. :(

I guess were better off just staying with PayPal. :)

Thanks again and have a great day!

Tony

Paypal or another 3PP like 2CO, but if you are accepting donations, 2CO cannot help you. If you are averaging more than $1,000 a month, a merchant account is going to be a bit higher than Paypal (if you are right at $1,000), but the more volume, that percentage decreases.

Originally posted by usvetsnetwork
Good morning and thank you for your reply.
I will look into ikobo and see waht they offer.

Thanks again and have a great day.

Tony
you're welcome, i'm glad i could provide some more options for you. i know ikobo may not be one of the best out there but for me it's been doing it's job nicely enough...
the choice however is up to you

We do accept donations on our main website usvetsnetwork.org but only sell flags at veteransflagdepot.us

PayPal so far has been good for us but some folks don't want to buy our flags using it for some reason?

I looked at your site - I could not really see a reason (other than Paypal being the only choice). Do you happen to notice that people add things to the cart & not buy? If so, it might be because they do not have Paypal. And they do not know that you only accept Paypal until that check out.

If you accept donations, etc, you might consider your own merchant account. This way - you get a virtual terminal so you can accept credit cards via the phone.

I will have to ask our webmaster about that.

I have received a few phone calls from folks who didn't want to use PayPal so we used our ProPay account to process manual.

Only problem is that ProPay is good only for $1000.00 a month and only $250.00 max transaction.

Can they raise that limit for you?

They can raise it but then all the rules change.

Gotcha :) - I never have been too familiar with them. You might then check out 2CO if you are afraid of not really hitting the $1,000 mark & use ProPay & paypal to accept donations

We have had that account for 4 years and no problems. Good service.

I think we'll sign up for the 2CO and see how that works out.

Thanks for all the help. :)

Anytime - good luck with everything!