Hello,

We're looking to take some donations via our website and have around 900,000 members of which a large proportion will probably donate and we need a way of handling so many payments (all of which will likely be $2-$5).

We don't want to do this with paypal as it's likely our account will be investigated for having so many payments in such a short period of time.

Do any of you have any reccommendations for taking CC payments without having to get a merchant account? We only want to take the donations as a one time thing for a month or two so don't need the hassle of setting up a merchant account.

Thanks for your help.

The only way of receiving payments with credit card on your website is with a merchant account.

If I was you I would contact the bank account of the organization to find alternatives, they may give you a solution.

For the kind of volume you are talking about, it would actually be well worth setting up a merchant account. I would not suggest sending that kind of volume through a 3rd party processor if you can avoid it.

I'm sure that there are a lot of merchant processors who would be happy to setup an account for you on that as well. That is more volume than the average merchant processes in a year.

You will of course need to provide some supporting documentation to get approved for a large enough processing cap and some processors may want to have a risk reserve in place for a few months before releasing 100% of your funds to make sure that everything checks out and there aren't going to be unexpected waves of chargebacks, etc.

give paypal a chance at it.

they have a small-transaction-amount option that could save you some money

I'd absolutely go for PayPal for donations (and not just because they heavily promote their donations "feature"). I'm sure if you emailed them before hand explaining what you're expecting you'd be fine.

Paypal would be the way to go on an smlaller comunity it worked like a charm . We had 20 000 users and they were eager to help an never lost a penny in the transactions. In thic case PayPal is a must !