merchant account providers

[frikus]

Can anyone recommend a good US merchant account provider other than the PayPal Website Payments Pro ? Is PayPal the best possible option in the US?

I made a phone cards online store for my client, it uses PayPal NVP API for charging.
The problem with the PayPal in my case is that 90% of orders are fraudulent.
Sometimes it's very hard to detect it, so they waste a lot of time and money.
This is from a blog by some Australian guy:

I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from other Paypal users. I’ve read through the chargeback policies at Paypal and while they do have a ‘department’ to deal with fraud, they make every effort to argue the case on behalf of their sellers and have an ‘industry leading’ low fraud rate I don’t feel 100% confident. They seem very reactive rather than proactive when dealing with credit card fraud. Their system doesn’t talk much about how they protect you from first taking fraudulent credit card orders, rather they help you to argue your case after a chargeback occurs. I know from experience that for online orders the merchant has little hope because the credit card company almost always is in favour of the cardholder.

Now my client wants to change PayPal to something else, but I'm not sure if this will help.
Also I'm working on another store and don't know what to recommend to my client.

Thanks.

[LifeinAsia]

I believe phone cards is one of the areas that most merchant account providers don't want to touch. It's not just PayPal- in general that industry has a lot of chargebacks.

[grandmastr]

Google Checkout, had a chargeback and they covered it for me. Make sure you have signatures for items over 300 bucks and your set. I have a few buddies in the ecommerce business and everyone just dumped paypal (tons of fraud and accounts been locked many times).

Just don't even bother with paypal, anyone can get their money back by doing a few easy steps. Don't want to tell how , since I dont want more fraud to spread.

[Corey Bryant]

Well you will need an electronic payment gateway - Paypal has one they bought from Verisign (sorry I am prohibited from saying the name on here, even though now I am retired). There are a few other gateways - they will connect to a transaction provider.

These transaction providers might even approve / decline the transaction if they have relationships with the acquiring and issuing banks, else the transaction is sent to the proper card association (sorry I cannot even say these names on here) for approval and then back to your website.

When looking for a US merchant account, look at their footer. They must tell you if they are an ISO / MSP or agent. Both will have the bank name listed. If it is an agent, it will tell you who the ISO / MSP is.

Maybe I can start saying the names now that I am retired perhaps? I still help out from time to time when needed and promote a few in my signatures, but now I administer and moderate forums.

-Corey

[frikus]

Google Checkout seems to be a good solution -

...Guaranteed Payment: Checkout's Payment Guarantee protects 98% of Checkout orders on average -- when an order is guaranteed, you get paid even if it results in a chargeback...

Is it possible to integrate it in the existing website with custom forms?

2 grandmastr: Did your buddies dump PayPal in favor of Google Checkout?