Forum Moderators: buckworks
I need to select a method of accepting payments online. I have done a fair bit of reading including here at WW but I have a number of questions which I hope you can help me with.
Website/Business Description
I run a business directory and want to start accepting flat fee payments from business owners for inclusion in the directory. There will not be a high number of transactions processed. In the first month, maybe 200 transactions, and after that, maybe 100 transactions or less per month.
My site consists of static html and Java (jsp's and servlets). While the directory serves the US market, I operate out of Canada. My business account is Canadian.
From what I have read and based on my current situation, I want to go with an external/third party shopping cart. I am primarily interested in accepting credit card payments.
Liability Issues
I am considering using Americart and would like to know if anyone has thoughts about their service. In Americart's agreement, they shields themselves of liability and I would like to know if anyone is using a similar service in which the shopping cart vendor does not shield themselves of liability. For example, are there any credit card billing services that would accept responsibility if their system is hacked into and credit card info is stolen?
Using a third party credit card processor is particularly appealing to me as I wanted to pass the liability on to someone else. My question is, do external shopping carts generally accept liability or do they shield themselves of it in their agreement?
What Do I Need
The way I understand it, if I am going with an external shopping cart, I will also need to open a merchant account and a payment gateway account. I do realize that some companies offer both of these in one application.
Am I correct in thinking that I need a merchant account and a payment gateway (in addition to my current business account) or are there other ways of doing this? There is not a problem in me signing up for a merchant account and payment gateway, I just want to make sure that is what I need to do.
My Options
Can you please suggest options I should consider to accomplish the above in terms of who I can use to provide an external shopping cart, merchant account and payment gateway.
While all thoughts and suggestions are most welcome, it would be much appreciated to hear from anyone in Canada as some options seem not to be available to Canadians.
Thanks very much for your help.
-gomer
I even came across a canadian lady who tried to open a PP account 3 times and couldnt do it.
[edited by: TallTroll at 11:10 am (utc) on April 19, 2004]
I checked out MyPaySystems and went through their demo. I was hoping to get more of a feel of how the service could be used and integrated into a website from a technical standpoint but the details were slim. Basically, they said, use the control panel to 'generate a HTML code to integrate your website'.
I take it this means that the control panel will generate an html form which will post to the shopping cart on their site. When my customer is finished paying on their site, what page will they be sent to on my site, do I get to control that? Also, when my customer returns to my site after paying, will there be some indication of successs or failure in the URL string? Basically, I need to update my database with success or failure of the customer's attempt at payment. Hope the above question is clear, if not please let me know and I can clarify.
Also, with MyPaySystems, is there an option of placing my own banner on the checkout page?
I have read a little about the PayPal's merchant features to accept credit cards. I find PayPal to be very confusing in general and their credit card services were no exception. The following was not clear to me: if I used PayPal to accept credit cards, do my customers have to have a Paypal account? It seemed to me that the payment buttons they offered for the credit card services still said "Paypal" on them. Before I got my own Paypal account, I remember leaving many merchant sites because I did not want the hassle of signing up for Paypal.
In summary for Paypal, if they could accept credit cards without the Paypal logo and without my customer's having to create a Paypal account, I might consider it, but I was not clear on this from looking at thier services. If anyone can comment on this, it would be appreciated.
Thanks again!
-gomer
Also you can check out: [oscommerce.snappyserver.com...] - osCommerce is a good shopping cart. If you like ASP, check out [spidersales.com...]
-Corey
I checked out oscommerce but I don't want hosting bundled with my shopping cart and spidersales offers a bit more than what I need.
-Corey
[edited by: TallTroll at 11:11 am (utc) on April 19, 2004]
[edit reason] tidy up [/edit]
With a cart the liability is on your end, but with a service like 2Checkout - it's all theirs, all you have to do is pop the code onto your pages. I have monthly recurring billing that way from a web host - and they're located in India (which is probably why they're using it). It works just fine, I get email notification of the charge by email.
Course, it's fine for a one time payment too, but people can easily forget renewal times and going recurring would probably be a convenience for you, plus increase renewals long term so it's an option you might want to consider offering to your customers.
[2checkout.com...]
WorldPay is also well spoken of, and I believe it interfaces with Mals Ecommerce (free and premium remotely hosted cart, also just pop the code on pages.)
With a remote payment processor the customer pays them and they pay you, so all the finances, security and liability are on their end.
2checkout is just the type of thing I am looking for. I am pretty new to Ecommerce and I realize now that I was using the wrong term, third party shopping cart. What I do want is a third party to capture and process the credit card order on their site and 2checkout does just that.
I looked at 2checkout but could not find the answer to this. When the customer is finished the payment process, 2checkout will return them to one of my pages. Do they also let you know in anyway if the payment process by the customer was sucessful? When the customer returns to my site, I need to know if they successfully paid or not so that I can update their membership status accordingly in my database.
I hope my question is clear, if it is not I can explain some more.
Thanks.
-gomer
Actually you could still get a merchant account - most merchant accounts offer a secure payment gateway - like LinkPoint Connect, Authorizenet.com, Verisign PayFlow.
-Corey
