Recommended Merchant Account?

[tomcarl]

Wondering if there were any recommendations (besides PayPal)

 

[Chris Wright]

Square is a worthy contender.
Approval for service in 1 or 2 days.
One account for all cards (AmEx is not seperate like many MA).
Simple fee, no mysteries or surprises.
And money goes into your account faster than other services.

 

[Voodoomoodoo]

Depends on your use case. If you're integrating with a website/back-end system for some automation then I've heard Stripe is really cool. Else, as Chris said, Square is great. I personally think Paypal is alright. I've heard plenty of complains about it but I've not had any issues so far.

 

[tomcarl]

Any of you used Google Wallet?

 

[TheFifty9Sound]

Used Stripe on a few sites. It's pretty good and devs love it.

 

[snowbird]

I noticed the OP of this thread asked about a Merchant Account. Like others have already said, it depends on your use case and what is most feasible for you. Some of these providers do not permit certain types of activity or sales of products due to levels of risk and other types charge different rates depending upon your usage. Keep in mind that products like Square are not an actual merchant account. That is a payment gateway. You can tell because your business name is not listed exclusively on credit card statements. Instead it might show "Square*YourBusiness" instead of just "Your Business" If you want an actual merchant account, you would have to speak with a place like First Data or PayQuake to name a couple. If you get an actual merchant account, they will usually do a credit check on you and things of that nature and your application gets reviewed by underwriters. If you are looking to do online services, then you may be better off with a payment gateway like 2checkout or paypal. A good merchant account provider for online services would be CDGCommerce.

What is the main difference between a payment gateway and a merchant account provider? Often times it will be the fees. For example payment gateways such as Square or 2checkout often charge around 3.25% per transaction percentage wise plus 20 cents to give you a ballpark idea. But if you have an actual retail store with a terminal and you sell clothing, you have less risk as a brick and mortar store and you can reduce your transaction fee to a rate as low as 1.5% in some cases instead of the 3.25%. So what this really comes down to is whether you have an internet business taking online purchases or if your a person taking transactions from someone in person. The fees are higher for online transactions because there is no physical credit card being swipped, therefor your placed into a higher risk category.

 

[tomcarl]

Thanks for all the info and recommendations.

Basically I want something that works just like PayPal but is not PayPal. Where I can invoice end users at the end of a sale via email and it's simple and easy.

I have PayPal, I don't like the company. I don't trust them with significant sums of money after all of the horror stories I'm constantly reading.

 

[ablaye]

How about Authorize.net? They are really popular for ecommerce websites.

 

[venturefile.com]

You can use 2checkout.com. They also offer receiving Paypal payments but they also add another layer of security as every transaction is fraud checked. Their fees are a bit higher then Paypal though..

 

[Domainzy]

For instant modern payments without fees:
Bitpay.com
CoinBase.com
Gocoin.com
Circle.com

For slow old-fashion payments with fees:
Square.com
Stripe.com
PayPros.com
PaySimple.com