Ok so i know about the different merchant companies, im in the UK and im looking at worldpay, they allow payments to be made in GBP, they accept the UK cards Delta, Solo and Switch.......their remittance fees into bank accounts are low compared to US companies where i would have to get cheques sent in USD and be charged by the bank or pay international wire fees etc.

So this is to anyone who uses worldpay particularly in the UK, are they worth the high fees? do you get money in a reasonable amount of time? Have they ever not sent you your money?

WorldPay are certainly worth the money, their services and support is great... everytime I call their phone number, there's someone there ready to answer my questions or help me. I've been with them for about one year now and have had no problems. Sometimes I think they might have been slow in transferring money to my bank account, but they've always paid and usually on time. They are a little on the expensive side though, especially with the setup/activation fees, but as you said they accept all the major credit and debit cards and since you're trading in the UK they can send payments to your account very easily, something like £0.50 per remittance, which is very cheap compared to the £6 or so that you have to pay if you had a USD cheque/check from a USA credit card processor company.

Alan

as from 12june on new accounts they are chargiing an extra £50 for worldaccess and £100 for the recurring payment one but since i charge yearly and dont take payment over the phone i shouldnt need these should i?

Worldpay's anti-fraud protection and verification is a complete joke. I have, and others at fh have asked the staff at worldpay [the UK office] about extra ways to reduce it, and to increase verification checks and the such. However they don't seem interested except to pass me on to something else.

NB: WP coverthemselves 110% in their contract - read it extra closely before signing so you are aware of what you are dealing with.

Ok ok, you managed to get me going now [Worldpay being one of the few things that annoys me, read why]:

1. Sent Worldpay contract to them via Recorded Courrier - they lost it. We had to find out who had signed for it. Once we did that and called them with the person's name who signed for it, they 'found it'.

2. We signed up with Worldpay because they offer multi-currency billing USD, GBP, EUR. We signed up for this service however when ever we tried billing anything but GBP it failed. We told WP and Tech Support said it was a bug in their processing system:eek:. Ok we thought surely they will fix this in a few hours. Well no, it took 3 months+. By this stage we had given up on billing on anything but GBP, I called out of interest and someone at WP said "Oh, but your account is only enabled for GBP":angry:. The primary reason for using them was for their multi-currency billing ability - and they blamed me saying I didn't specify it, yet I distincly remember specifying it on signup. Not to mention Tech Support thinking it was a bug without bothering to check if GBP was actually enabled - to me that is incompetance!??!

3. Then come the the only chargebacks we have ever had - fraudulent users using stolen CCs:angry:. Yes a common complaint I am sure. WP just go and debit the chargeback from your account despite having provided the Dedicated Server etc. However we found they were actually unwilling to offer help of anythign to reducne this risk to us e.g. forced AVS verification for a payment to go through, Bank name checking for US orders or any other extra verification measure. Its not not me that has dealt with them but 3 other people here, all having the same problem.

It takes 4 weeks to get your money remitted. Unless you neogotiate with them.

I have read other experiences on here that have been good with WP but my vote is negitive.

Jonathan S.

Originally posted by tazd9t9
as from 12june on new accounts they are chargiing an extra £50 for worldaccess and £100 for the recurring payment one but since i charge yearly and dont take payment over the phone i shouldnt need these should i? Yes, that should be fine, the recurring billing is a really good feature to use for web hosting companies, but if you're charging yearly, the payments can just be made once a year, manually.

Flyinghosts... those are some fair points, I guess that's just a personal view as we had no problems signing up with WorldPay at all, I feel that they are a very strong company.

Alan

we had an account with them, they held the funds too long

not tolerable business for us....

Yeah i read that they take 4 weeks but this is actually less hassle for us than signing up with a US company and having to pay all sorts of wire fees, check processing fees etc.

They are just pure class. Used them for over a year now and never had a problem. They're ALWAYS there when you need them.

I would recommend them to anyone and everyone.

We use WorldPay and have no complaints, they have offered us great support from the begining. All our currencies work fine and recurring billing improved our sign up rate straight away. They could have more service's which would improve them, like being able to change the amount of the recurring bill, or even change the date of it.
Overall great company.

You can change the amount of the recurring bill. Create a hidden field called "option" and set its value to "1" instead of "0".

Thats should do the trick. :)

Thanks :) i did not know that. Do you know of any documentation at world pay about that feature, I cant find anything.
Regards

No problem. Best advise is to ring WorldPay directly and they'll email it to you. :)

visit here

http://support.worldpay.com/admin/

and search for

Downloads sections, here you will find many documents to download.

Hello
I have to agree with Flyinghosts.

Worldpay introduced a £15 chargeback fee because they had extra security built in.
This consisted of allowing Visa customers the option of typing their PIN number in at the point of sale.

A total joke.

They now make more money out of chargebacks than real sales so they are less interested in preventing fraud than they were before.
Prior to being taken over by NatWest they were planning maor anti fraud improvements but that went out the window very quickly after the takeover.
Natwest just use them as their payment gateway and have little interest in developing it as a seperate business now.

Unfortunately we are stuck with Worldpay because no one else will take us on because of the size of the account and the risk involved in Web Hosting.

Gordon

Unfortunately we are stuck with Worldpay because no one else will take us on because of the size of the account and the risk involved in Web Hosting.

People actually have refused your business? Who? Can't you get your own merchant account if you are that big?

If this was the case then how would any large business be able to trade online...

Well
Wew require multi currency processing of $50,000 pe rmonth and were turned down by Barclays because the account was too big and it was web hosting.
Also because the company was less than a year old (which is a joke because we just transferred the assetts to another company last summer)

They just didn't want to touch web hosting and they told me they were trying to "exit" other business in this field from their merchant account program.

Gordon

Jeeze thats strange and rather worrying. Thanks for your input on this debate though, it's appreciated.

Jo

We had a merchant account with Barclays, this was about 18 months ago, we had it until January this year. We had no problem getting the account even though we are web hosts. All they said was: "With the risk of the Business you will have to wait four weeks for funds to be credited"
We left them for worldpay, because we were not happy with their system. Although maybe a little more expensive, we have found worldpay a lot better. Four weeks, we have found while looking at merchant accounts is the general waiting period for funds for this industry. Which I dont know why people complain about, ok so the first month is hard but after then you have a constant flow of money anyway, so who cares what week it is from. If you take 2k a month then you will recieve 2k a month even though you are a month behind, whats the big deal???

Regards

This all depends on your rate of growth, whether you offer dedicated servers, web design as an extra etc. etc.

If you don't have much money coming in, four weeks could be a looong time.

The big problem is that they claim that your customers are their customers.
They are also heading for a big VAT problem.

They told me that I couldn't have my VAT number on receipts
because THEY were buying the goods from us and selling them on to THEIR customer.
I then asked them why they didn't charge VAT on top.
To which they replied "we are registered in Jersey"
So I said " not since last year you aren't"
Silence.

Anyway, I feel very unsafe with them as they could kill our accounts at any time if we had a chargeback problem or
for any reason they chose.

All I can do is wait until the current company has its first years accounts.
Barclays were looking for us to have substantial assetts due to the risk (read - my house as collateral).

Gordon

Hmm... is that the Barclay's ePDQ service? I've heard from others that they don't accept web hosting companies because of the high risk involved, as you said. But there are other services that you can use like a merchant account with Authorize.net.

Alan

Ouch. You actually have me slightly concerned now about worldpay. Isn't the fact that "your customer is their customer" going to be the same with any card payment company? Unless you have a merchant account, that is.

Thats the problem.
It is real merchant accounts, in our companies name.

As I said, prior to them beinf taken over it was possible to
speak to people involved in developing the business and
have a dialogue with them.
It just doesn't happen now.

Gordon

I also agree on the 4 week remitance. If you are growing fast, a 4 week period between recieving funds and paying for hardware, rackspace, b/w etc. is a distinct problem. Sure if you have no growth or low growth its fine as its just an initial lag, but not good news when you have strong growth.

Also ePDQ is GBP only.

Jonathan S.

4 weeks is a long time... but it really depends what kind of business you're in and how much capital funding you have for your company.

Alan

ok, ignoring barclays etc, does anyone else have any comemnts to make about worldpay, i dont have long 2 make my decision over them so i would appreciate as many views as possible. Thanks :)

Sorry about going off topic (I'm sure that wasn't my faut :stickout)... basically, if you don't need the cash and can wait 4 weeks for it then it's probably your best choice. They have a great service with very good tech support, you'll do good with them as they're a very big player in the credit card processing industry.

Alan

Damn, Gordon, that's bad man. I know that recently they had started asking for bonds from some of our resellers that wanted to sign up with them.

We're with them and they're excellant, no extra charges for charge backs, no charges for using the recurring billing features, excellant fraud protection system.

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
Damn, Gordon, that's bad man. I know that recently they had started asking for bonds from some of our resellers that wanted to sign up with them.

We're with them and they're excellant, no extra charges for charge backs, no charges for using the recurring billing features, excellant fraud protection system.

Nah they now charge for chargebacks, not only their commission but the exta £15 I believe on top.

Sorry, I'll clarify, I meant for ePDQ in my last post.

oops, my bad.

Its web hosting thats the issue.
The account manager told me that they would have a tough time getting that through a risk assessment unless we had substantial assetts.

Actually we do have quite large asetts but not quite enough.

I actually feel quite trapped and that is not a nice feeling.
Worldpay is OK but I would like to know that I could switch if i wanted to.

Switching to Epdq would have halved our CC costs and that would have allowed us to offer lower priced plans if we wanted to.

Its the feeling of being trapped thats not nice.

Anyway, back to work.........

Gordon

I'll second what Karl said, they have been excellent for us so far. I've been 110% satisfied. :)

We are changing from 2checkout to Worldpay - I hope everything goes ok with the new billing company!!!

hey, why are you switching to worldpay? are you unsatisfied with 2checkout? what are their flaws?

Why is waiting four weeks a problem, i dont understand. You get your money each week, just four weeks behind. So after your first four weeks there is no difference any way. If you take 500 a week for example (Could be anything) then you would get that each week. So with respect after your first four weeks you get your money every 7 days. 7 days isnt bad is it??

This was discussed earlier and we said that it's not a problem unless you are expanding rapidly, for example. Your costs are going to quickly escalate and unless you have a large cash pool it can be hard waiting four weeks for the money to come through. If you aren't expanding all that quickly, then waiting four weeks won't be a problem as you should be able to survive on the money generated from the previous four weeks.

It also depends on what type of credit agreement you have with a supplier - if they will dispatch services and expect payment four weeks later than you have no problem.

So to conclude I think we can say that the four week problem is going to be one that will affect some people and not others. If it doesn't affect you, then thats great. :)

Thought I would post this update:

Worldpay added a 6p per transaction charge in return for checking the e-mails of customers against a database of known fraudsters (utterly useless IMO)

So I wrote to them and complained in the strongest terms, pointing out that the reason they had no per transaction charge in the Uk was that they had a higher percentage rate than in the US.
I also listed all the problems with their current security system

The unexpected result was that they wrote back that the transaction charge was being enforced on all customers but they could vary my other charges.

Given the size of my account and my additional security measures they cut my rate to 3.95% and debit card transactions to 45p
Once I add on the 6p transaction charge I will still be better off on Visa/MC/AMEX
With debit cards I will be 1p worse off per transaction.

This goes to show that its worth complaining.

Gordon