Merchant Payment Vendor

Anon

Hi, can anyone recommend a good merchant vendor for a subscription site? Ideally, I would like to submit subscription information and have the vendor hold the credit card info and rebill them every month, instead of me having to hold the credit cards. I would also like to have the payment scripts hosted at the vendor, similar to payflow link from verisign. Can anyone help?

Anon

I use WorldPay at my site (http://www.pcpropertymanager.com). We've been with them for over a year now and found them to be excellent. They have a subscriber service which we haven't used but it does just what you want.

They hold some info, graphics etc but they have "callback" scripts which you have on your site - they call them and pass variables. I use it to update a mysql database and send additional emails to my customers.

The only problem we had with them last year was that the callback script couldn't be held on a secure site.

The other minor flaw is that they hold your money for 4 weeks.

The 2 BIG reasons we went with them were
low set up fee
multiple currency processing - not everyone wants to pay in US dollars!

hope this helps.

sarahk

WorldPay are at http://www.worldpay.com but are based out of the UK.

Anon

Hey, I don't know how serious you are about what you're doing...(business license, business model, etc.) but the best merchant bank to go with if you are small is Card Services International. They deal with a lot of small businesses and give you the flexibility to look big instead of posting stupid paypal images or other fake "e-commerce wannabee" links on your site. Card services has serveral APIs through a company called Linkpoint and you will be able to handle payments like the big boys do.....if you know your stuff.

The (free) APIs are in C windows, C *nux, and Java. They also have wrappers that you can buy that are written in Perl, PHP, and ASP which will give you the flexibility you need on your site. If you are in a hurry, they also have a html-based commerce solution.

http://www.linkpoint.com

Sarah wrote:

WorldPay are at http://www.worldpay.com but are based out of the UK.

sarahk

Thanks, I'll look into that. Our experience is that it doesn't impact on the user experience.

An initial review of LinkPoint didn't convince me that it had a sufficiently global outlook.

Currently we can accept payment in Canadian Dollars, Australian Dollars, British Pounds as well as US Dollars. We're about to drop our home currency in favour of South African Rand as these are the 5 currencies used by the bulk of our customers.

It's also tough as a non-US vendor to get access to US banks.