Hello, on 09/15/2008 10:13 PM Dan Joseph said the following: > You should look into a lot of merchant services providers. Don't settle on > the first one. Try and get your per transaction rates as low and possible, > and shoot for the lowest %age rate possible. Find out what the lowest going > rate is all over town and set that as your goal. > > As for PayPal. 25% of my customers pay with PayPal. Yeah, I've had the guy > who stole the other guy's account and sign up accounts with it, but really, > if you watch your transactions, and put in some fraud protection, you're > fine. > > Also, I chose to take credit cards, paypal, and google checkout. I didn't > want to limit anyone from paying. If there was another popular means of > payment, I'd most likely go for that too. > > I hope that helps.. This is good advice. I started with Paypal which seems to be the most mature and affordable solution that addresses the needs of many small Internet based businesses. But there is no perfect payment solution. Paypal accepts many forms of payment but it has restrictions. In some cases they require that customers create Paypal accounts to accept payments but then they do not accept credit cards from all countries. In other cases they require that customers disclose bank accounts even though they will only pay with their credit card. Currently I am deploying 2checkout. I was recommended because it would accept credit cards of people from countries that Paypal does accept. Also customers do not need to create accounts like in Paypal. I have not yet deployed 2checkout but I already have a few comments to make. Their documentation system is clumsy to say the least. Actually it is a bunch of articles that you need to search to find how to do each thing. Paypal documentation is much superior. Paypal really provides consistent implementation and reference manuals. 2checkout also does not seem to have encrypted payment buttons to avoid somebody altering your shopping cart and callback payment verification system that you can user to verify if payment notifications are authentic. They has some MD5 hash verification that you can use to verify if the transaction notifications really came from 2checkout. It should do for avoiding forged payments but you should implement your own verifications. I cannot comment on Google checkout because they only accept vendors from US and UK, but I suspect they are still playing catch up on Paypal. In any case, I also recommend as Dan, implement several payment methods but explain to the customers when each method is more recommended than others. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos Find and post PHP jobs http://www.phpclasses.org/jobs/ PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
