Need UK Credit Card Payment Processor

[PaulHerschell]

Can anybody recommend on-line credit card processing sites for small to medium sized business. Who are the major players - we know of WorldPay, PayPal and Protx - who else should we be considering? Are there any comparison charts in terms of charges etc imposed by these companies? Which ones require seperate merchant accounts and which ones include the payment account as part of the service.

We have 3 businesses looking for a solution at the moment

- one gets only a couple of transactions per month, maximum annual credit card turnover £1000 currently paying 6% of transaction amount to high street merchant provider for manual system with fixed £15 per month
- another gets 100 or so transactions per month approx £1000 per month, currently paying 1.75% of transaction amount to high street merchant provider for electronic terminal system
- a third gets 1000 transactions per month approx £60,000 per month, currently paying 1.50% of tranaction amount to high street merchant provider for electronic terminal system.

All 3 organisations wish to use more secure 3rd party on-line authorisation systems.

Any assistance in helping to identify which provider is suitable for each will be really appreciated. Thanks

Paul

 

[jobo123]

Hi Paul,

We are UK based and use PROTX. They have a product comparison page on their web site that we found very handy for comparing the various (ever changing) offers:

http://www.protx.com/products/pricingvsp.asp#pricingcalc

I would say however, that PROTX have recently changed their costing arrangements from a per transaction approach to a flat rate monthly fee so it really depends on the number of transactions and the average transaction value.

We did need a merchant account for PROTX and we got this through Lloyds Bank - it was fairly quick to set up - a few weeks (once they had found the right forms to give us).

The main problem we had with PROTX was integrating our web site with their e-commerce secure site - it was a bit of a pain but got there in the end.

All in all I still think PROTX are about the best for a UK based opperation.

I'll be interested to hear other opinions on this one.


John Davy-Bowker
www.dbLetterWriter.com

 

[Mata]

I'm just starting up trying to find a company to process the transactions.

I'm a complete newbie at all this but for a scattergun approach to predicted sales figures

http://www.securetrading.com

come out very well for a variety of different turnover scenarios.

Good luck with the hunt, I'm on it too!

Matazone's The Other Side -
Animations with a twisted sense of humour

http://www.matazone.co.uk/theotherside.html

 

[PaulHerschell]

Thanks for the replies everyone, been away from here for a while hence the late response. Yes Protx does seem quite appealing, even with the recent price hike or so it would seem for those with very few transactions, but with a moderate number of transactions it may not make much difference. They are my favourite at the moment, but I also came across the following site

http://www.electronic-payments.co.uk.

This appears to be an independant site that allows you to plug various stats into a questionaire about how you operate and then brings back a list of figures from all the major solutions easily comparing their costs side by side in a bar chart. The costs on the Protx site where a little unfair I thought as they did not include Merchant costs and the competitors they were ranking against did not require merchant accounts in addition. This site lists all costs including merchant account so its much fairer. Even so Protx still came out well with my figures. I have asked my customers to visit here and feedback the results so that I can choose say the 3 most popular to support in my software. The site mentions getting a free chat with an independant consultant at the end to discuss your results. He is supposed to call within 5 days but not called me yet, shall have to wait and see if that part is any help.

 

[Mata]

Cheers, that's a good link!

I've ended up going for a package solution from

http://www.get-trolleyed.co.uk

Good luck!

Matazone's The Other Side -
Animations with a twisted sense of humour

http://www.matazone.co.uk/theotherside.html