I've searched for info on this for a while but can't seem to find much.

I run a web development company which provides e-commerce solutions (website, hosting, store). We would really like to provide a merchant account/payment gateway to our customers as part of our packages, we want to handle all aspects of getting it setup so we can provide a complete solution to the customer, and avoiding at all costs having to direct our customers somewhere else where they have to set this up themselves.

I know some merchant account/payment gateway providers have partner and referral programs, is this what we need? how much control would we have over the process? we want as little involvement from our own customers as possible and want to handle everything ourselves.

Anybody know of any UK providers offering such a program?

What's the best way to go about getting this setup?

Any other advice or experiences on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Try to look into NMI ( Network Merchants) thats what you will do best with, to maintain or even to develop your own payment gateway will cost a fortune and you will need to be PCI compliant.

It is not worth the effort, also many of the smaller companies are using similar service as NMI and a few other private label gateway providers, most of them even gives you an option to rebrand the interface if it is what you want.

Thanks for the info.

I definitely don't want to develop my own payment gateway. I just want to provide a gateway as part of my web solutions to my customers, without them having to go through a separate process.

does NMI take UK merchants? Cant find any info on their site

NMI is a Payment Gateway, you will need to get in touch with these guys to get a list of banks they work with or at least a few names.

If you can't get it from them PM and I will give a few hints.

ah so a merchant account needs to be obtained separately? That would mean my customers would still need to go through the process of getting a merchant account themselves, like I said in the initial post i want to avoid that.

I need a merchant account AND payment gateway all in one solution.

I am awaiting info from them anyway.

Okay sorry for the confusion, but when you say payment gateway it is one thing and merchant account is another thing, in general and as it should be you will always have your customers to sign up directly with the bank often it is made with a 3 party agreement, if you are looking for 1 Merchant Account where all your merchants can go through, then it is called 3rd party processing (TPP) this isn’t allowed, there are some work around on this which is very used by many of the companies out there and even startup MSP’s but it is also Risky, you will lose if one of your merchant fail to comply or simply get excessive chargeback fees while they exceed their ratio.


It is a good start with NMI also to explore how everything works; it will give you a good picture. Alternatives would be a Latvia Bank / Processor (it is a combination) http://www.transactpro.lv they are used by many also here on the forum to provide payment services to merchants, they accept sometimes pharmacy and gaming and always regular e-commerce.

They have tighten their TOS a lot towards new merchants, that’s good since it hopefully assure that they won’t went up their belly.