Payment processor for multiple small sites

Is there an economic solution?

[foghead]

I'm hoping some of the wise folk here can offer a creative solution, although I suspect I may be looking for the non-existent.

I have half a dozen US based small ecommerce sites selling unrelated goods, services and downloadables. Up until now my strategy has been to use a separate 2checkout account for each. Expensive and a little painful I know, but gave a reasonable look with the ability to heavily customize the payment pages and an acceptable overall cost.

As has been documented adequately elsewhere in these pages 2co have now become "more trouble than they are worth" and I need to move on.

Question is, where? Given that each store is small, is there a way to use a 'proper payment processor' without applying for 6 merchant accounts and paying for 6 set up fees, 6 monthly fees, 6 SSL certs etc?

Price is important of course, as I don't want all the site revenues to disappear in fees, but the consistent appearance of the site pages as the customer (hopefully) moves through the checkout process is key also.

I'm thinking that maybe it could be achieved using Authorize.net AIM (using free shared SSL for the smaller sites and a dedicated one for the biggest site), if their system will cope with mutiple sites on one account. I wonder what would then appear on the customer's cc statement.

Any informative suggestions from users would be very welcome, the whole area seems to a be a complete minefield and straight answers are hard to come by.

[kc0eks]

well my solution for this was to simply set up one merch account with my DBA name. None of my sites have the DBA name, but all mention this name on checkout so the customer knows where the charge will come from.
I simply run all my charges manually, from all of my sites (about 10).
As far as if my merch provider would like this, provided they knew, I doubt it.
Thats how I handled it, otherwise if you do it correctly in the processors eyes you would need a seperate account for each site...

[Corey Bryant]

We have helped numerous customers set this up before. You should have the "main" DBA in the footer, something like:
Yourdomain.com is a My Company LLC website.

And then definitely have it on your payment page (Visa regs). And when you send them a receipt, put it on their as well (Visa Regs).

The reason the above two are recommended is to help prevent chargebacks. People get their CC statement and see A Pet's Paradise, but yet they purchase a ream of typing paper. So make sure your DBA can be generic enough for all your websites.

This should work for the most part unless you are selling a multitude of products & services, which some might be high risk. If so, you might be better off having two merchant accounts.

And also, never try to hide anything from your processor - doing this can actually result in them terminating your account and possibly ending up on the TMF list

-Corey

[foghead]

Many thanks for the replies kc0eks and Corey. I'll post back when I get the final strategy worked out :)