Knowledge Base
Question: The local chamber of commerce has hit me up with the idea of accepting credit cards on their web site. Other than doing a little reading about PayPal implementation, I know zilch about it. I have to tell them something and I honestly don't know where to start. They have members who want to pay their dues via the web site and they want to offer "Merchant Coupons" in incremental amounts in order that the purchaser can redeem merchandise at local stores. Do you have any advice?
Reply: 1) If they have their own merchant account, then they can forget the PayPal stuff. If they don't have their own merchant account, they can get one with their bank (they surely have a bank there wanting to give them a break).
For someone (me, in particular) who did NOT have a bank wanting to give a break, the setup fees were somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. The merchant account will give them the ability to accept VISA/MC/AmEx/Disc and have the funds deposited directly into their bank account (for a fee, of course... there is a discount rate plus a transaction fee, and probably a monthly processing fee). I'd recommend you direct them to their bank for that information and stay out of the middle of it.
2) If they do not want their own merchant account, and choose to use PayPal - the setup is simple and the fees are published. The rates at PayPal are competitive with those of a merchant account, but the problem is you can only transfer the funds to your bank account once/month - so they'll be losing interest and/or will not have access to the funds except at the transfer time.
3) If they want their merchant account, then they have to decide how to process the charges. They could do that manually through some portal their bank provides them, or they could use an immediate online card processing company (I use iTransact.com - costs about $40/month but there is a set-up fee involved - somewhere around another $300 I think). Their bank MAY have an immediate online facility which could be accessed through programming on the website's backend - some do!
4) Powering the backend... Our programmers can certainly write anything needed - if it was simply a matter of membership dues, that would be easy enough to not have a custom program needed. Since they want dues plus incremental coupons - sounds custom to me... It would probably take 2-3 months to iron it out and test it, and we'd need a pretty good description of all the requirements "up front". Our programming fees are $1000/month if you work directly with the programmer and are involved in testing and so forth, and $1500/month otherwise - that should give you a general idea of rates to have a custom program built.
Lots of times places like your chamber don't realize the various fees involved in startup, and when they find out, they swiftly lose interest...
|
