Same Payment Gateway for Multiple Sites?

Going beyond Paypal

[TonyMc]

Hi,

I've been collecting domains (sort of a habit) and I want to put some of them to work as e-comm sites. I have a gateway and merchant account for my largest site and I have Paypal for the rest but I'd really like to find some sort of solution for all of the new sites so I can process payments in a single location. I just don't want to set up a bunch of Paypal accounts. My current gateway will charge WAY too much for each and every one of these other sites.

If only I could set up one Paypal account, direct them there through the cart checkout, then have Paypal return them to the appropriate site, I'd love it.

Suggestions?

Tony

[figment88]

Suggestions?

Read the PayPal documentation - this is standard operating procedure. In fact, you are not even supposed to have multiple PayPal business ccounts.

[Corey Bryant]

Are you selling the same things on all your sites and / or would they fit into the same SIC?

-Corey

[sun818]

You can use third-party merchant accounts. They charge a bigger processing percentage, but this allows you to brand each site with a low set up fee. After evaluating your site performance, you can revert back to Paypal or upgrade to a merchant account. Then you can recycle the third-party merchant account to another site.

[TonyMc]

Figment88 - The last time I checked you could only put one URL in the IPN preferences. I will double check that.

Corey - They fall pretty much into two or three categories I guess but the product themselves are/will be different. So, yes some are quite different from others. I'm trying to diversify! ;-)

Sun818 - I'm definitely thinking third party. I tried 2Checkout on a site and it worked well for a while. Their changes a while back were horrible though. I'd like to find a similar solution without all of the negatives or maybe just a gateway that won't charge me per website.

Thanks for the replies

Tony

[Corey Bryant]

If the SIC is the same, there is no reason why you could not use the same merchant account for all of the sites. Of course you might want to change your merchant identifier. And if one site has more chargebacks, consider a 3PP for that one and only push established clients thru your merchant account

-Corey

[sharbel]

Someone had mentioned they would use 2checkout.. 2checkout explicity forbids processing for multiple websites. They require you to setup an account for each, and collect a monthly fee for each account.

[imstillatwork]

you can override th IPN url in the paypal account settings by passing a new one in the querystring to paypal with the payment info...

[FalseDawn]

You can set up paypal to handle payments from multiple sites relatively easily, although there are some rather stupid limitations and really annoying things you can't do, like set up different customer support emails for each one (the email that gets displayed on the payment confirmation page). Also, you can't change the "name" that is used for your account on a site-by-site basis, so you would need to use a generic or "parent" name for this, which is far from ideal in many cases.