Have credit card terminal, need to process online payments

bearaman

Hi There,
A friend of mine is running a site that takes payments through PayPal. He recently got a POS credit card terminal from one of the main banks. Now he wants to ditch PayPal and go through the bank to take online payments.
Is this possible?
If not, is there another way to take payments for a merchant with a terminal?
Thanks very much,
B.

Hellm0

It depends on the path your friend wants to take. If he wants to do his own form in which the user is allowed to enter their credit card info he will need to invest in an SSL certificate for his website and setup an account with an online merchant. These guys usually supply you with an API which you pass the details of your transaction to.

The other option is using a link-to merchant account, where the details of the transaction(usually a product code and your friends company ID) are passed to the processing company and the user enters their details there.

I would express to your friend that it can be quite costly setting up credit card processing by the either method. Either way he will need technical work done to his site in order to enable the functionality properly and to setup the SSL on his site.

EKRIUQ

What type of payment option is available to his customers, Visa and Laser may be there but just not enabled on the system, where as he would then be able to get the numbers and manually input them into the machine.

cgarvey

Yes it's possible. It's a manual process with security concerns (you'll need to store/retrieve the CC numbers securely.. usually involves SSL).

Also, be aware that you may be in breach of your merchant contract, as some prohibit card-not-present transactions and most prohit online transactions (preferring you, instead, to take a different merchant account with these features.. costing more, of course!).

If it's low value and low volume, and you're OK on the merchant account front, then you just need some sort of DB system, an SSL cert (for your customers to enter details securely, some scripting to encrypt/decrypt the CC details, and a programmer to put all the pieces together.

mneylon

You'd have to be extremely careful.

If you have a merchant agreement for "cardholder present" transactions, then you'd have to modify that for "cardholder not present" and unless you were using a proper gateway etc., the bank probably wouldn't be that impressed.

bearaman

Thanks for all your replies.
I'm not really looking for a custom payment gateway, just an alternative to using realex. I would have thought that since he already has a terminal in the shop, it would be no problem to implement a page on his site as well. He already has SSL cert installed and currently uses PayPal. Do any of the Irish banks offer a secure page that he can direct customers to to process cards?
Thanks for all your help.
B.

di11on

I started off only offerring Paypal, because of the costs of the alternatives. When I added an alternative credit card payment facility, I saw sales increase dramatically.

It's well worth it... just take the cost on the chin.

I use worldpay. It's nice not being exposed to the liability of holding customers' credit card details!

Eoin

bearaman wrote: »

Thanks for all your replies.
I'm not really looking for a custom payment gateway, just an alternative to using realex. I would have thought that since he already has a terminal in the shop, it would be no problem to implement a page on his site as well. He already has SSL cert installed and currently uses PayPal. Do any of the Irish banks offer a secure page that he can direct customers to to process cards?
Thanks for all your help.
B.

I think an Irish bank will probably just point you in Realex's direction if you ask them about it. I believe that you can provide a template to Realex so the payment page looks like a page from your own site.

di11on wrote:

It's nice not being exposed to the liability of holding customers' credit card details!

Absolutely agree.

flamegrill

Why not use realex? They are relatively cheap per transaction, certainly a LOT less than paypal.

Don't use realex remote, use their realex redirect product. It requires a lot less work on your end and they deal with the entire credit card part of it.

We've been using realex for circa 3 years and we've have little if any issues with them.

amen

no connection but have you looked at Amazon branding shopping service?

cgarvey

flamegrill wrote: »

Why not use realex? They are relatively cheap per transaction, certainly a LOT less than paypal.

Don't use realex remote, use their realex redirect product. It requires a lot less work on your end and they deal with the entire credit card part of it.

We've been using realex for circa 3 years and we've have little if any issues with them.

For small value/volume, Realex work out a hell of a lot more expensive than Paypal. If he's willing to manually process transactions on a terminal, then I presume he falls in to this category.

mneylon

cgarvey wrote: »

For small value/volume, Realex work out a hell of a lot more expensive than Paypal. If he's willing to manually process transactions on a terminal, then I presume he falls in to this category.

If he's going to manually process transactions like that he could lose his merchant account

cgarvey

blacknight wrote: »

If he's going to manually process transactions like that he could lose his merchant account

Yup, that's a point I already made above. Many small retailers are happy to take that risk, and a few branch managers suggest that route (but not on record!). The CC companies generally don't care (in my experience) until it comes to chargeback, at which point you can more or less kiss goodbye to the money (and maybe the merchant account). Still if you're pushing low volume one charge back and it's associated fees, will be a hell of a lot cheaper than Realex minimum monthly amount!