What payment processor to use?

I’m sure I’m now the only one who have always had problems when choosing or working with payment processing service. There’s always a problem with them - bugs, ridiculous policies, too high rates, etc. So I thought it might be good to share some of my experience.

PayPal appears to be the most popular and although it had its issues some years ago, now I think it’s probably the best choice. Frankly this is the one I recommend to all my clients. Easy to integrate, support various payment options, low rates. A major downside is the inability to test with your account, you need to go with their sandbox. Don’t get me wrong - PayPal isn’t brilliant at all, but it’s “least bad” of all I’ve worked with.

2checkout is also good, although their admin interface is hard to work with and has some bugs. Their rates are higher than PayPal’s, but still bearable. I use them for 8 years and I can say they’re good. Beware though - they don’t allow dating sites, and there are many other restrictions as well - make sure you read their policy for allowed sites.

Authorize.net is also fine, although I’m not sure if they supported the recurring billing - but I guess they do, it’s a must for many sites today.

I’m not what was the case with Worldpay’s fees, but I’ve noticed there’s too much bureaucracy with them - they have too many rules to comply with. But in general they’re fine too.

We’ve also worked a lot with the British provider SagePay (former Protx). It takes some time to learn how they work, but once you do it, they’re fine. And I think their rates are good too.

I’ve worked with other providers too, but there are always issues with them. Not that I hadn’t had any with the above, but still, when a client is to choose a payment processor, I always recommend ones we’ve worked with, rather than ones we’ve never heard of.

When you choose a provider, make sure they have a good support! There ALWAYS ARE technical issues, well, unless you’re having a very simple payment - i.e. no recurring, no payment notification. So there must be someone to answer your questions.

Oh, I forgot one of the most popular ones, and my greatest disappointment - Google Checkout. Google always do things right - their search engine is brilliant, their maps revolutionized Internet, the translator does an excellent job, so I thought their payment service would be good as well. It wasn’t. It’s the one of the most difficult processors we’ve ever worked with. So I’d stay away from Google Checkout, until they improve it.

And finally - be very careful if your site has adult content! Finding one is truly a mission impossible! The good ones are quite high (10% or higher commission), and almost all of the above (if not all) disallow adult sites. And which is worse - sometimes they let you use their service for a while and then they suddenly say you violate their terms and block your account. I’m not sure what happens to the money you’ve collected but the block itself is a pain if you have members paying and you can’t take their money until you integrate a new payment service. I guess it’s not their fault - simply they have no time to review all new sites at once, they do it over time, and the moment they find something wrong, ban you.

Some of them doesn’t make it quite obvious they don’t accept adult sites, so please make sure that you read every piece of their policies, and to be on the safe site - ask them directly.

There are other things to observe when choosing a payment gateway - such as how often they pay you, what currency they accept, etc… Also there are other populars I haven’t mentioned here - such as Moneybookers (I checked them some time ago but I gave up for some reason, I don’t remember why). So the above is NOT a review or anything - it’s just sharing my personal experience with these services.

I hope this has helped, and I’ll appreciate any corrections or additions to the above, as well as your own experience.

George

Try Stripe?

Tho…at the moment it is currently US only. Can accept payment from outside the US of course.

The only drawback is that Stripe is currently unavailable outside of the United States. (Note: Stripe DOES accept credit cards from overseas; it’s just that you can’t sign up for a Stripe account outside of the U.S.) They’re working on expanding to other countries.

I guess few people prefer Pay Junction over paypal because of various reasons. Although paypal is quite famous, pay junction offers better customer support and a flexible reseller and merchant pricing. Another important aspect of pay junction is that the pricing package is a consolidated single package and there are no hassles of upgrading or purchasing additional services.

I’ve just been using Paypal and Authorize.net as of late. Both have been fine for what I’m doing. Authorize.net does do recurring billing, but there is an additional fee included per month.

I am using paypal and quite happy with the services. I am running my two sites and using paypal for all my transactions.

PayPal has been the best so far for us. No other merchant has been able to to offer a Multi-Currency acceptance and settlement in one account package.

They provide clear published rates with price breaks and once you go over a certain transaction threshold you get an account manager and negotiated rates.

80% of our customers also pay with a PayPal account.

Paypal, Google Wallet and 2checkout (over $200 monthly) are your cheapest options. If they accept you that is.

Currently we are offering our clients to pay with Paypal and 2checkout. At the beginning, when we were trying to find the best payment processing companies that did business in Canada, which was already a bit hard if you don’t pick up the most common ones, but we ended up using the simplest and most easily implantable modules like Paypal’s. We used to have InternetSecure and Elavon (through internetsecure) but dealing with them was usually a bad experience. I would not recommend them.

Telling someone which payment processor they should use is a bit tricky since there are so many that I haven’t tried yet. I guess telling you which not to take might be more useful. Don’t do business with InternetSecure or Elavon, really. If you have a problem and need their help, you will not be able to get any kind of useful assistance from them.

Another important thing would be to know if you plan on installing a payment gateway on your site or not. If you do, then from my experience you are going to get more chargebacks and trouble dealing with the company that provides it. But I’m sure that is hasn’t been the case for other people.

PayPal may be the most beneficial to date for people like us. Simply no additional merchant may be capable of to supply any Multi Currency popularity and also relief available as one accounts bundle.
I am using PayPal and quite happy with the services.

Although there are many payment processor available, we are happy with paypal not to mention it is accessible to major cities world wide.