payment gateway and merchant account issue! :(

Hi all!

I am starting an online graphic design studio through which i will be targeting people in US, UK, Canada and Australia. I have put up my website and now need to have a payment gateway to accept payments from customers. I am new to this and am very confused about many things!!Would be grateful to anyone who can answer any of my queries :)


Does one necessarily need a merhant account before putting up a payment gateway? Or can the money get transferred to my personal account through the payment gateway?


Please suggest some names of secure and cheap payment gateway provider except Paypal that would enable me to accept major credit and debit cards of US, UK, Australia and Canada?


Best Regards
Radhika

It does not really matter where your customers are based unless you are relying on an Internet Payment Service Provider (IPSP) (since they sometime will limit some countries and vet other transactions a bit more)

However, if you are in the United States, your options are pretty limitless for a merchant account and an electronic payment gateway. Most gateways will allow you to have a test account (which some developers will say are worthless because when you are ready, you should be ready - but that is a different argument).

Let's assume you are in the United States. You have probably a hundred choices for an electronic payment gateway and thousands of choices for a merchant account. You don't really need to get a merchant account until you are close to going live, since it usually takes less than 24 hours to be approved if you are doing less than $30,000 a month.

If you are in Canada, it can take a couple of weeks to get an Internet merchant account unfortunately, so please allow some time for that.

For the electronic payment gateway, go to the specific site you had in mind and look for a test store. It should take less than a minute to complete the form and then within another minute, you should have a test store.

If you are looking at an IPSP, some of them will offer a testbed / sandbox if you will to test a few transactions.

Just noticed Corey didn't mention the manual payment gateway alternative.

If you can get a MOTO (mail order telephone order) manual merchant account from a bank and team it with a manual payment gateway you should save yourself some money from my reckoning.

Now that the PCI DSS is in force these new PCI DSS compliant manual payment gateways seem to becoming a popular alternative to real time gateways. They are a lot cheaper, inherintly more secure for you as well as the card holder, but the obvious draw back is the charge is manual.

If you are not receiving too may cc payments online it could be a nice way to save a fair bit of money.

Cheers

Look at Payflo pro( Paypal product) it's the all in one payment gateway and merchant account credit card processor. Works well and is compatible with many shopping carts and has security filters for credit card fraud prevention.

As suggested by cloe2006

Quote:

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If you can get a MOTO (mail order telephone order) manual merchant account from a bank and team it with a manual payment gateway you should save yourself some money from my reckoning.

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I just can support this statement. Especially if you are new, you can save a lot of money this way.