Reply to: paypal/worldpay

re: merchant account

from a website

Re: re: merchant account

Is that on eBay or from a website ?

Do any of your punters have problems (new signups seem to have a credit limit set depending largely on the number of sunspots and whether Jupiter is in conjunction with the moon - possibly the wind direction is involved too and whether Friends is on the TV that night)

re: merchant account

selling cds for about 18 months and no problems with paypal so far.

Re: re: merchant account

PayPal is less if you process enough transactions in a month, actually - you should check because they won't give you the lower rate unless you ask for it.

We have our own Merchant Account. We use the secure services of Mal's eCommerce (which are free) www.mals-e.com.

They offer full integration with Protx, PayPal, WorldPay, Nochex and many others.

We prefer not to process automatically via Protx, but Mal's collects the customers CC/DC data and we use the Protx Virtual Terminal.

If you pay about £6/month Mal's can be integrated invisibly into your own website (ie no Mal's logo's etc.).

Re: re: merchant account

RobAnt - thanks for all this info. Fortunately being here and not general it will hang around long enough for me to take up all your refernces - I'm certainly not over happy with using PayPal as a merchant partly because of the dire stories of having your account frozen but mostly because of the possible/probable loss of business because of the delays and kludgy way they do the account setup.

I'll check the nochex stuff and also the merchant you mentioned - one thing though - are you actually processing the transactions (requiring secure server which we don't have) or just shoving the whole lot across to your merchant ?

What are the complete transaction fees for low voume ?

PayPal is 20p + 3.5% (and they lie by giving the US rate of 30cents + 2.9% on some pages)

Re: re: merchant account

Lots of useful information about Nochex

greenroom.nochex.com/

Re: re: merchant account

Great I wish we could but you need to have a merchant account to do that which cost bucks.

Cost us £250 one off fee and £20/month for processing up to 1000 transactions/quarter via Protx (www.protx.com).

If we exceed 1000 transactions in the quarter the rate goes to 6p/transaction.

Easily comparable to Worldpay charges I should say.

How can I confirm an Unconfirmed Address?

An address can become confirmed one of two ways:

1. When you add a credit card to your PayPal account, the address on file with your credit card company becomes Confirmed.

OR

2. You may confirm your address through Alternative Address Confirmation (AAC).

To qualify for AAC, you must meet the following requirements:
Be a Verified member of PayPal
Have been a PayPal member for more than 90 days
Have a Community Participation buyer number of more than 10
Be a U.S. member in good standing
If you qualify for AAC, you will need to fax several documents to PayPal, after which we will mail a secret code to the address you are trying to Confirm. After you enter the secret code correctly into the PayPal website, your address will become Confirmed. For more information, please see our User Agreement.

Sorry, I think I meant you should ADD a credit card to your PayPal account.

AAC obviously doesn't work for non-US members.

Re: re: merchant account

> Users only need to register their credit card with PayPal to get their address confirmed.

Nope .... here is an extract from my account which always shows an unverified address - people have asked and some include the paypal slip with stuff I've bought...

Status: U.K. - Verified (92)

The verified means I've registed and verified my credit card.

>For now, we process our own credit card transactions.

Great I wish we could but you need to have a merchant account to do that which cost bucks.

If ******* starts to earn some money (unlikely til we get more suppliers on board) we'll ditch PayPal but as an ultra cheap (free) way into taking credit cards over the web it is worth considering.

A standard Nochex account is useless for that - it takes ages to verify (you have to do so by entering the value of 2 small debits against your account which takes 3-4 days). Few people already have accounts. To pay the (verified) customer has to transfer money into their account (costs them 99p). When you get the money from the customer it is good - only 99p to transfer as much as you like into your Swiss bank account but if that is the only way you are taking payments you won't get any customers. I will checkout the special sellers account you mentioned though - could be ok for us.

Re: re: merchant account

Nochex only process debit cards, and won't touch credit cards at the moment.

Advantages for traders is that there is a special "Sellers" account, which adds the ability to process transactions with non Nochex members up to £50, and higher daily/weekly/monthly "takings" limits - but if you use the account to buy as well as sell, then you can only send money up to the amount you have received from your "buyers" - irrespective of the balance, or how much you transfer into your account from your own bank account (although you can send amounts that would take you over that limit direct from your bank account).

Nochex is a bit quirky, and we haven't had a Nochex customer for some time now, nothwithstanding an entry in their "High Street" listings.

I've never seen a paypal payment with a confirmed address and I've taken dozens witout any problems.

Users only need to register their credit card with PayPal to get their address confirmed. They can also confirm by other means. We'd rather not have the business than deal with a service which is so dangerously insecure. We'll review our PayPal acceptance policy when they review their International users chargeback policy!

For now, we process our own credit card transactions.

re: merchant account

try www.nochex.com

they are basically the british paypal. no probs with them so far.

another point, the problem with Person-to-person payment is that the customer needs to be registered. with worldpay you don't need to, but your company will have to pay a fee for its usage (and I think you need to be VAT registered)

Re: Worldpay are as bad

Using PayPal as a merchant account has some problems ...

The paying limit for new signups (before they are verified) seems to be fairly arbitrary and can be low (I asked PayPal and got a load of bollux back which basically said the limit is fairly arbitrary and can be low) We lost a sale of around £100 on ******* because the customer credit limit was too low.

PayPal goes offline Friday mornings like eBay - not sure if the merchant services part does too but I suspect it does.

You can lose business with a PayPal merchant account. Fees are 20p + 3.5% which is quite hefty.
According to paypalsucks they can freeze your account and it takes an age to get money backout.

I've never seen a paypal payment with a confirmed address and I've taken dozens witout any problems.

PayPal does have one major advantage over WorldPay et.al. - it cost sfa to set up and the others cost around £350.

What Rob & I decided was to use PayPal to see if the site made enough sales to warrant paying out the £350 for proper merchant services.

Re: Worldpay are as bad

paypal is extremely popular - lots of people have it and lack of support for paypal may mean that you will lose quiet a few sales. like I would not pay with credit card to anyone on ebay but I will gladly pay with paypal.

Re: Worldpay are as bad

If you sell goods, stay well clear of PayPal - Nochex is fine, but limited in terms of order value.

My experience shows that you should only accept PayPal customers if they are already Verified members, and, when they pay you check that the address they give is CONFIRMED - this second point is most important.

There is no insurance for Non-US PayPal members, and chargebacks can be completely arbitrary.

Also remember that if you do receive a chargeback, you will also incur additional costs.

Re: Worldpay are as bad

Paypal or nochex are probably the only solutions if you can't get an internet trader account.
Looking through the costs paypal worked out expensive althoughI believe that paypal has improved since being bought by ebay.
Also worth looking at barclays ePDQ.
For payment integration have a look at www.idreams.co.uk/
takes care of the shopping cart and all the back end and integrates to ePDQ.

Re: Worldpay are as bad

i used paypal a few times to PAY FOR GOODS - worled fine. I think you are fked if you get in trouble, dont know how rare it is. PayPal now owned by Ebay and for sake of their brand they will have to make it decent (if it was not), otherwise big lawsuits will be coming -- unlike paypal ebay has got free cashflow and nice target for laywers.