Adding a payment option to site - Which Merchant Option?

Baz_

I have to add a payment option to someones site, and I was wondering if people could:

A. Indicate which options, in terms of the merchant account, are available (i.e. paypal, an actual merchant account)

B. Which of the options you would recommend.

I'm not being lazy, as the client is not sure how successful it's going to be, I'm thinking along the lines of paypal, as it is less effort/risk/costly if you aren't too successful.

I am however looking for people to provide me with their wealth of experience on this matter, and give me guidance, and hopefully open my eyes to any folly's that I have missed.

Thank you in advance.

Baz_

mneylon

Baz

No offence, but this question seems to come up here about once every ten days.
If you have a search over the past 6 months or so you should see a number of similar queries to your own.

It should help you as a starting point

Michele

regi

I've turned off search, I'm afraid, till I get the shiny new servers working

Baz_

blacknight wrote:

Baz

No offence, but this question seems to come up here about once every ten days.
If you have a search over the past 6 months or so you should see a number of similar queries to your own.

It should help you as a starting point

Michele

Well goddammit, I guess I was being lazy. The idea never so much as entered my mind, granted with the search facility being off it hasn't helped me to remember, but I still could have at least trawled a few pages.

No offence is taken Michele, in fact I hope my laziness didn't offend any users.

/me walks off shaking head and thinking I would have been the very one to point that out to anyone else



Baz_

P.S. Although it was put a bit strongly, I did mean everything I said up there.

mneylon

Well, as the search function is off, here's a couple of threads that may (or may not) help:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=307583
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=300002

Baz_

You ripper!

cheers

Baz_

Just read through all them threads Michele and thanks again.

2co are expensive though, I am not sure yet what the average cost per transaction is expected to be on this website of mine, but I get the feeling it won't be that high. $0.45c per transaction is still €0.02c dearer than paypal, and with a low average transaction fee 2c could make quite a difference. The percentage they take is a good bit higher too 5.5% for 2co as compared with 3.4% for paypal.

The question I'm ultimately driving towards is: would you still consider 2co to be the best of the two options when dealing with low transaction fees, and also would you recommend 2co much more highly than paypal?

All are welcome to give input here, not just Michele (sorry to be overly familiar, I just prefer Michele to blacknight, or even bk).

I was about to say thanks again, but I'll wait for the response 3 times is enough for now.

Baz_

mneylon

Baz

If the transaction volume and average value is low then you need to factor that into your calculations.
Paypal is a good option in many cases and you can now pay for products and services via credit card even if you don't have a paypal account.
They've also got quite a few developer tools and plugins are available for most e-commerce software.

And don't apologise for using my name

Michele

leftofcentre

Go with paypal, thats what I use for my sites and its great.

Serbian

I don't think you can customise the look and feel of the Paypal checkout to suit your site -- that's something that irks me a little as I like to keep consistency throughout a site. If and when Paypal Payments Pro is available to non-US customers, that could be a great option, and if you don't mind the payment area looking different to the rest of the site then Paypal is a good option for low transaction sites.

mneylon

That is one of the major downsides to using Paypal. No matter how you integrate they still have to leave your site to go to the paypal one and the options are, as you said, quite limited

misterq

you an customise the paypal page a little bit, but not very much, by adding a header with your site/company logo.