Ian_Cowley - 5:07 pm on Mar 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

Worldpay offers the benefits of a combined merchant account and payment service provider. The downside is that they hold on to your money for too long, and charge a hideous percentage rate for handling the payments.

I recommend that you get a separate merchant account and then you can choose whichever PSP you like.

The first thing to make sure is that the Payment Service Provider (PSP) offers fixed price processing. Basically you want to pay a fixed price per transaction, not a percentage. Secpay, Protx and Axiar Payment Solutions all offer fixed price transaction processing.

For many people the price of the service is the deciding factor. Personally I would look for the most reliable, even a store doing 5000 transactions a month should only be paying £700 per month, not a huge amount. You only need a couple of hours of downtime on a busy store and the lost order money soon mounts up.

Barclays EPDQ/MPI service has been down for a whole day today (I have a friend who runs an ecommerce store using Barclays). Many people would think that Barclays would be a safe choice but today's outage proves not.