I am putting together a team, of software developers, banks, and businesses, to make a payment processor to compete against paypal, 2checkout, and (the scam) ********. One of my business parteners interested could bring 10,000's of accounts.

I am looking for your input on what features are important ( please state the order of importance, because most likely we will not be able to do them all), what fees are acceptable, ect. Also what you hate and what features are not important. Please post any ideas you may have.

Ben Hoffman

Obviously things like low fees, good support, fraud prevention are all super important these days. Also having the ability to integrate with popular billing programs and such would be a good thing.

But what do you consider low fees? I am looking for details. Thank you for the post though.

3pp rates considered as good would be less than 5% , and that is considering from 0 to 50 US in setup.

If the set-up is higher, a lower % rate.

Less than 2 weeks remittance time.

Fraud prevention.

Support for all major cards.

A support department which is actually reachable.

A validated physical presence and open information about ownership.

A good back end system where the merchants can log-in check transactions, do refunds and so on......

An atm card for merchants to withdraw founds from the account.

It sounds like your volume may be such that looking into a true merchant account might be a good solution for you. The same things still apply, good customer service, low rates, no setup fees, early termination fees or monthly minimums.

Good luck in your search!

It doesn't matter how good your system is or how low your fees are if merchants don't get paid.

Your primary concern should be ensure that you have sufficient working capital to pay merchants if there is a delay in banks paying you. Also you need to give mechants support re chargebacks. Above all BE HONEST.

Personnally I'm sick of the excuses spewed out by some of these processers. They simply load all their problems onto the merchant whilst refusing to listen to anything the merchants say.

From my own experiences I would simple not be inetrested in signing up for any new service not matter how good it looked. This whole businesses seems to be infested with con artists.

Personnally I'm sick of the excuses spewed out by some of these processers. They simply load all their problems onto the merchant whilst refusing to listen to anything the merchants say.
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That is why I am posting here I want to hear what the merchants want.


I know there are alot of con artist out there, but I want to change that. About not wanting to try a new servive I understand that, but if you never try anyhting new you might miss out on something really good. And that goes with anything in life. But whatever you choose is great!

benhoffman

Important Features:

1) Automated PHONE vertification - when visitor place order on my website - your system automatically CALL him and ask to verify order by entereing PIN that he can see on webpage (generated by 3PP)

2) Ability to charge money in UK, CA, US, JP, AU money - different prices for different markets

3) Online chargeback resolution tool - every time when somebody dispute charge you send me email and I will provide all information thru Web-Based interface - faxes and snail mail is not good enough

4) Ability to accept real ONLINE CHECKS (not in lame way as PayPal does) - something like TeleCheck

5) Shopping Cart integration - ability to hookup your payment processor to OS Commerce and MIVA

I don't mind pay 5% for this kind of service, but I don't want to pay VISA registration fee of $750 for high risk businesses ;)

One time setup fee up to $199 is OK as long as you can offer all of above

1) No fixed commission. This is especially true for merchants who sell cheap e-products. I mean I would gladly pay a higher percentage but no fixed commission as for a one dollar product it can cost 50% of the price. Maybe two solutions (one with fixed + percentage and the other with no fixed commission and higher percentage).

2) Ability to charge money in UK, Euro, CA, US, JP, AU,... money - different prices for different markets (copy)

3) Multilingual processing

4) trusting the merchant a bit (even if it means asking for a history of the merchant/company), with lower rates for long-term fraud-free merchants.

There has to be a fixed comission because teh credit card companies charge one. Otherwise one each dollar transaction the company would loose $.30 can't stay in business long with that.

The other can be added. (except we are looking into the automatic phone verification feature that is a little more difficult).

Ben Hoffman

Ben,

Automatic Phone vertification can be done for extra fee - let's say $0.75 per call (optional feature for merchants) - most company's don't mind to pay that much - but this feature alone give you a LOT of business from web hosting company's.

$0.30 + 5% fixed for VISA/MC/AMEX/Discover is OK as long as you can offer phone verifications for orders. Otherwise, without "special feature" you cannot attract much peoples - I would'nt switch from Worldpay even if you offer me 2% (what you cannot do).

Steve

Originally posted by benhoffman
There has to be a fixed comission because teh credit card companies charge one. Otherwise one each dollar transaction the company would loose $.30 can't stay in business long with that.

The other can be added. (except we are looking into the automatic phone verification feature that is a little more difficult).

Ben Hoffman

I'm sure it can be done and we will do it. We are just looking into it further.

Ben Hoffman

From my perspective, an ability to accept funds from customers worldwide would be important. I'm happy to use paypal, but not everyone is lucky enough to live in a country that they deem worthy.

BP

Make it free also without any Monthly or yearly or setup fees and accept credit cards too is a good one And Able to support all countries what i mean by that is u can add ur bank account info to your system and you can add and transfer funds to and from your bank account to your payment proccesser system

Make it free? Come on.... this guy is asking serious questions. Let's give him serious answers!

(If you think you can build a FREE service, go right ahead.)

BP

This service shouldn't be a free service if we speak not 3PP service about. Otherwise the service must be free.

I welcome setup/monthly fees when you get own merchant account.
You must respect guys who are doing MID for you. Banks and processors don't have big margin on merchants (I'm talking normal e-commerce business about). That's why they have to charge you, merchants, minimal fee to cover administrative expenses.

Support for major credit cards would of course be number 1, and maybe some debit cards. I've noticed lots of places don't accept Visa Electron but lots of people use it.

Professional service and quick support.

It would also be nice if there weren't many restrictions on the location of members, like how Paypal does it.

This was going to be something similar to paypal but with a lot more features such as the ones you give me here. It will be able to accept cerdit cards, debit cards, echecks, even paypal, and 2checkout payments all in one system.

Location wise I don't see why paypal picks and chooses who is worthy to have an account and who is not. We will plan on have almost all countrys available (maybe not right away but soon after opening).

Ben Hoffman

Well not sure how you would accept funding payments by paypal into your system? I thought it was against paypal policy to do this? I could be wrong tho, wouldnt be th first time :) Plus as weird as this may sound, honestly I think the chance of fraud via paypal is higher than someone paying directly from their CC. I do realize there is chance someone has stolen the CC details etc, but just the ease of how chargebacks can be done by paypal with a click of a button seems to me that you'd only be increasing the risk of fraud in your system.

Sorry double post :|

It will be almost impossible to use that credit card information even if they had it (which would be almost impossible to get). We are going to do it Better than paypal. We will have a security sentinel that checks for IP and/or browser information each time a user logs in. A change in IP and/or browser will prompt the user to enter a temporary code which is sent to the users main email address. Each user can set which security checks the sentenial performs.

Meaning you can make it as secure as you want it to be. The thief would have to be at your computer or know your email address as well to get into your account. (you may turn these features off if you wish, but why would you?).

With features like these how would fraud be commited?

The question is does paypal permit funding of other accounts this way? I have seen numerous other threads on other sites where there were payment processors who accepted funding via paypal and someone would always mention it was against paypal policy to do this. Ive never looked into it but since you are considering starting one I guess you would have.

I have looked all through Paypal's user agreement and have not found anything that said that, but I could be wrong. So if anyone has the exact location of that clause I would like to know.

Ben Hoffman

As mentioned before I'd have to say definitely need the following

1)Weekly payouts

2)Accept international personal and business accounts.

3)Clear and exact costs/fees especially regarding rolling reserves etc.

This thread is getting pretty long now so I hope something comes out of this :) Looks like there's a few people interested.

It will but we are going to do it right which takes time, planning, and money.

For me, the most important things are:
1. Been in business for more than 1.5 years.
2. Ability to set up automatic/ subscription payment.
3. Ability to change the subscription amount.
4. Ability to accept payment from different countries.

I would skipped the item 3.
Prices must be fixed and no way to change them if they are recurring.
customers must be billed by the price what they saw upon the initial payment.
Otherwise it is ready chargeback if you bill them for higher price.

I have a multicurrency account so I would like if money could be received and sent in different (major) currencies without exchange fees. Useful but not decisive.

The possibility to check your account and decide when you want to transfer the funds after a minimal threashold. ie since transfering funds can cost a certain amount, choose when to do the transfer and not have it done automatically to save up some money (does not cost the gateway anything) if payments are few or irregular.

These are some good points that you bring up, I think security defiantly needs more attention.

PM me sometime, I am also trying to develop a better, more secure payment system.