uk online payments

[Paul Richards]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 07:55:04PM +0100, Dimitrios wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 16:02:47 +0100 Paul Richards <paul at freebsd-services.com> wrote:
>  
> > To follup up on this, I've since discovered 
> > http://www.protx.com  who seem to charge a flat fee of 5p per
> > transaction with no setup fee or other monthly charges.
> > 
> > I'm going to look into them some more, but compared to the alternatives
> > this seems like a bargain. You will need your owb merchant account of
> > course since this is just a transaction processing service.
> 
> If you require a merchant account, then it may not be suitable for many people.
> 
> a merchant bank account has a transaction fee on most banks, so ontop
> of the 5p charge by protx.com, you'll get an additional fee by the bank.

Well there's two types of account, merchant accounts and bureau
accounts. With a merchant account you have a direct contract with the
a card handling bank, with a bureau account you have a contract with the
transaction processor. In the former case you just pay the bank's fees
and the rate is dependent on your circumstances and is generally quite
low even if you are a small business. With a bureau account you pay the
transaction processors fee, which is generally a lot more than you'd pay
with a merchant account.

e.g.

With a merchant account you might pay 2% per transaction to the merchant
account provider, then 5p per transaction to the payment processor,
whereas with a bureau account you typically pay something like 4% to the
payment processor (which of course covers the merchant account
percentage plus a cut on top).

Almost always it's cheaper to get a merchant account and then a fixed
per transaction charge payment processor.

As you can imagine, if your selling something like a PC then 2% + 5p is
a lot less than 4%. 

> if they used plain bank accounts, then they would definetely be a bargain.

That doesn't really make sense since what you're paying for is the card
transaction handling, there's no actual account as such, the money goes to
whatever bank account you specify. In that sense, they all use plain
bank accounts at the moment :-)

-- 
Paul Richards