Small business website -- accepting online credit card payments

spigmite

Hi there,
I'm the publisher of a small quarterly magazine. We are looking to expand our website so that we can accept subscriptions and single issue sales via our website.

The obvious option would be to use Paypal. However, in the process of attempting to set up paypal 'buy now' buttons I have encountered a problem, and have found paypal to be pretty unhelpful with their customer support. Further investigation has shown that there are a large number of people who are very mistrustful of paypal generally, so I am now wondering whether to use them at all.

Does anyone out there have similar experiences of setting up their small business websites to accept credit card payments? Anyone able to help me with Paypal? or does anyone have any alternatives to paypal that i should be considering? or recommendations of anywhere to go for advice generally? Books i should be looking at? etc
many thanks,
nick

roaming_rhino

hi

you could try https://www.nochex.com , similar to paypal and accept online payments I believe

1jim

I use Nochex for my site and it is fully integrated with the checkout page. The charges are slightly less than Paypal as well
Hope this helps
Jim

katiepops_2

Nick, do you actually have credit card processing facilities?? If you do, I can recommend a super company who will collect all the cc information securely for you.

Kate

katskorner

There is also Worldpay to consider as an option.

careerwumman

I'ved use Worldpay since 1999 on my site, dietarycard, but you really need to making a phenomenal number of small sales or a medium sized number of largish sales (over £150) to justify the cost. Their customer service is abominable, set up costs are high and transaction fees are uncompetitive. I've heard good things about Nochex, i was just too late to change this year and my Worldpay sub was due.

Mark7799

Nick.

If you're a member of the Federation of Small Businesses, you can access card processing facilities at cheaper than standard rates - try https://www.fsb.org.uk for more details

lucasgd

One of the probelems with Paypal is the number of emails I get phishing for passwords. I think this is the reason many don't trust it. They also have higher fees than Nochex. However if your transactions are £100 then the fee is only £3.60 which is not too bad 3.6% but on small sums of a few pounds it is more like 10- 37%!

I wish more people would use Nochex but because Paypal is integrated with (and owned by) Ebay it is harder than ever for other payment systems to get a look in.

Another possibility is PPPay.com which is integrated with the ebid.tv auction site.

spigmite

dear all,
Thanks for the advice. Our magazine is too small at the moment to use a company like Worldpay, or to look at getting our own Merchant number etc.

The last week I've been testing both Paypal and Nochex. While on balance i prefered Nochex, (less cluttered, cheaper commission, UK-based etc) there was a rather major bug in its software, which means that sometimes, your customer's address is not included in the confirmation email that you are sent when they order. As these details are not held on the nochex site, the confirmation email is the only place the delivery address appears! Nochex say that they are aware of this as a problem, but couldn't/wouldn't be any more specific. As I'm not using any 3rd party shopping basket software at the moment, this basically rules out nochex. What good is an ordering procedure that doesn't guarantee an order address?!

A shame, as I would liked to have steered clear of paypal if poss, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be an alternative.
cheers,
Nick

bordercars

not sure if this will help this link is to a company that arranges creditcard payments via a mobile phone or office link the mobile rate is £30 pa + a % and the office is for unlimited users at £120 pa + % the % is variable as you can decrease your cut if you like leaving a min of 6% per trans.
https://www.taxi-pay.net

competitionscafe

You might find this discussion useful?

Choosing an Online Payment Processor
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1634