accepting credit cards for a service business

what do you recommend?

[mantispraying]

I have a website that offers a service online. I need to accept credit cards but don't want to hassle with a full-scale merchant account. I have looked at authorize.net and paypal business accounts, but I'm wondering if there is anything else out there. There was one company I was looking at, and I wish I could remember their name. They specialized in accepting credit cards for online service businesses.. they had like a $49 startup fee, and you could process transactions up to $249 per month. Anyone have any ideas about this? or any recommendations?

[Visit Thailand]

Just my 2 cents for what it is worth. But after my terrible experience with paypal, I buy online and want a simple service.

That means IMHO accepting all major credit cards. When I see sites that want me to pay with this or through that I think twice.

If however like amazon I can simply enter my cc number, wait a while and get the books I am happy.

I know it can be a pain but getting credit card acceptance direct from a bank is IMHO the way to go.

Could you imagine walking into a shop and being asked for something you have not heard of and know nothing about.

I say stick with the Amazon principle and get the cc accounts direct. It is hard enough getting customers so you don;t want to turn them away with a payment strategy they are not happy with.

[Crazy_Fool]

mantispraying
i think the one you're talking about with the $49 sign up is 2checkout.com. although it's cheap to sign up, transactions are more expensive than other providers. worldpay costs more to set up but is cheaper per transaction with much greater transaction limits (virtually unlimited).

there are loads of card processing companies out there. look at as many as possible, check for sign up fees, annual fees and monthly fees, % per transaction and so on. some will require you to have a bank merchant account, some will hold payments back in reserve against chargebacks. make a list of all those you look at with their terms and charges.

for each processing company, work out costs for X number of transactions @ $Y each per month. multiply this by 12 and add annual / monthly fees to work out how much it could cost you per year to process with that company.

remember to look at other ways to accept payments other than from your website. make sure you can process orders received by telephone, fax, post, in person etc etc etc.

[sonny]

Maybe Propay.

[Marcia]

mantispraying, I bet the one you can't recall is on this list:

[ccnow.com...]

I've seen the one with $49 startup, but their percentage rate is high.

I use PayPal to take payment for services all the time and have never had a problem yet. I do withdraw the funds right away, leaving only enough to pay for a hosting provider, which I pay for through them, since that host is out of the country and I preferred not to use the bank card.

[mantispraying]

Thanks for all the help folks. The one I was thinking about was clickbank, but I've actually decided to sign up with ccbill after reading some reviews from webmasterworld and talking to the sales rep. The transaction fees are high (14.5%), but there's no setup, therefore there is no risk if my service doesnt' sell. If it does sell, then I can always switch to another provider. Anyway, thanks again for the quick and courteous replies.