I've been looking through the forums trying to find a new host ('jumping' ship from Jumpline), and I have a question about credit card transaction processing that might help me figure out what I need to ask a host...

My site is my band's website (http://shizit.net/) which is mostly used to communicate with fans, provide mp3's for download, etc., but we do sell CD's & t-shirts on it as well. Right now we are using PayPal to accept payment, but it's annoying for lots of people who don't want to "sign up" for something just to buy our CD. Ideally we'd just have a secure order form where they enter their CC num which verifies they've got the money and transfers it to us (I have NO use to store their CCnums, we value our fans privacy very strongly). Anyway, so as I'm looking at all the options it seems not many hosts have detailed information about how this works. Some say "ecommerce" ready, or that they provide shopping carts, but none of that seems to include the CC trans portion.

So does anybody have more information, or maybe a good place to point me to on the options?

From what I understand there are a couple ways to go:

1) Improve the interface we are using with PayPal... I think it's possible to make it easier for people to use PayPal, but even PayPal's website doesn't detail how to do this very well

2) Get a 3rd party shopping cart/merchant/gateway all in one provider like revecom.com or 2checkout.com or ibill.com - can anybody recommond a good one? What are the pros/cons?

3) Get a host that has something like RedHat Interchange or osCommcerce (or Miva?)... but do these programs do the cc transaction? They have the shopping cart, but what happens when somebody enters their info & clicks the "buy" button? Doesn't that have to go through a gateway? Where do I go for that & how much extra should I expect to pay?

We are finalizing our Certificate of Formation (LLC) & Business License with the State of Washington, and TaxID with the Feds, so we will be getting our bank account set up at Washington Mutual soon, they claim to offer Merchant Account services, does anybody know how I would interface that with the solution I choose above? Should I wait until we get that set up or is it relativily easy to get the website running now and tell the shopping cart software to use our WM Merchant account when that gets going?

Thanx for any help you can provide

i use www.propay.com

they will accept the use of international credit cards


there fees are pretty low

they do have a "Set-up Fee" which they want paid by a check only but as soon as they get i had my account ready to use in 24 hours they have pretty good tech support as well

the setup fee i think is $35

small price to pay really

Hi, well it's interesting to see that one of your options is getting a third party provider since basically already have one.

Paypal is a third party provider just as 2checkout is.

Wheter to get a third party provider or a merchant account depends on how much sales you predict. The best thing about third party providers is that you do not have to worry about much. They provide the secure pages, they handle the billing and you receive a cheque.

The downside to this is that usually you pay a higher fee per transaction then you would if you have a merchant account. So at some point it becomes cheaper to use a merchant account. It's up to you to calculate when. (keep in mind that a payment gateway/merchant account comes with a fixed monthly rate)

When I started up my company I choose for a third party provider because that way I would only pay a transaction fee on actual sales. Had I chosen for a payment gateway/merchant account it would have cost me about $30- - $ 50.- per month even if I made NO sales.

For a gateway solution take a look at this: http://verisign.com/products/payment.html

2) Get a 3rd party shopping cart/merchant/gateway all in one provider like revecom.com or 2checkout.com or ibill.com - can anybody recommond a good one? What are the pros/cons?


I suggest Revecom. I have never had a problem with them and they have recently sending payments every week instead of every 2.

thanks for the replies,

propay looks interesting, nice that you customers don't have to sign up in order to use it, but it doesn't look like it integrates well with a shopping cart (other than BizHosting, which I'm not that interested in)...

Pilgrim: I know I can use PayPal as a 3rd party provider, but is there any way to use them that doesn't force customers to sign up? Ideally I'd like to have people be able to just fill out their order, enter their CC and be done with it, without worrying about signing up with anybody. Our sales are pretty small right now (30-50 cds a month), so I guess it makes more sense to go the 3rd party route... I also have limited developer time and I'm pretty much doing all that myself

thanx again for the replies!

Paypal wants everybody to signup
as far as i know its because they need the members so they can say that are the largest payment system on the net or something like that

they might have the most members because they force people to signup but they suck customer service and feature wise

but i still use them lol


Thanks
Daniel