How to except payments? Paypal, merchant account?

[edacsac]

I have a website that can sell unique items - wysiwyg so to speak. So I need to control my cart. Abandoned carts at least need to repopulate inventory after a short time. Right now I have a pretty slick cart setup to deal with abandoned carts, but now I have the problem of choosing a merchant account.

I used Paypal in the past, but I had a chargeback issue where paypal tried to reverse a charge more than 30 days later. This resulted in well over $1k in overdraft fees (paypal would try to reverse the payment several times a day) and a locked paypal account. They basically shut me down.

After that, I moved to an advertising/article based model, but it's just not as good. And now that I have some experience with content and advertising, adding product back would do wonders.

My concern is, when I was selling through paypal, I'd only sell around $100 or so month. That really just covered hosting. If I go merchant account, I will always be in the hole, as it seems there is no plans for low volume merchants. If I do $100 a month in sales, I'm still paying $30+ a month in fees.

Suggestions? Like I said earlier, I need control over abandoned carts since my product is individual wysisyg items.

[Corey Bryant]

You might consider 2CO as another Internet Payment Service Provider (IPSP).

For a merchant account, you might look at CDGCommerce if you are in the United States.

The electronic payment gateways (Payflow, Quantum, LinkPoint / YourPay / First Data Global Gateway, Yahoo!®. Authorize.net / Cybersource) range in monthly fees - $10.00 to $60.00. Some of the gateways will give you free (unlimited transactions). Some gateways can provide you with some free transactions, then charging you a fee. And some gateways might charge a flat fee per transaction or a percentage of the sale.

Since though it seems that this venue might not be worth a merchant account, unless you plan on expanding and your clients might not favor using an IPSP. Having a merchant account early on will help to maintain consistency throughout the checkout process - for the new and your current customers.

It seems you have done your homework on the subject and pretty familiar on the industry. Having the IPSP, you are usually charged with what you use. That might be better for you.

As far as a shopping cart - you might consider posting a new post with a subject relating to shopping carts and also provide what language / database you are wanting to use.

[edacsac]

Thanks for the great reply Corey! I looked up CDGCommerce and they are suprisingly inexpensive for merchant services. 2CO doesn look to bad either, but if I can swing it, I like CDGC better.

I do have my shopping cart working as I've designed, so hopefully interfacing and completing a transaction with a merchant/gateway won't be too difficult. 2CO looks less flexible, much like paypal.

Thank you again!