I know a lot of people who are either professional developers or have some development background. So I asked around as to what's considered the best merchant account system to work with. The things I'd look for were robust developer tools, a reasonable transaction fee, reliability, and promptness of payment. Yet it seems like nobody is doing this job right.
There are lots of fly-by-night places you wouldn't trust a customer's credit card number to. Then there are big old banks with exorbitantly high rates and zero technical ability. Then there's the hit-or-miss PayPal experience, where your customers have to jump through hoops to pay you, and you have to actually send money to people if you want to test the system out.
Has anyone ever had a good experience with this stuff?
Are you talking about something of the CCBill/iBill variety?
Yup. We had a generally miserable experience with iBill in my last job, and I am imagining there has to be something better than those.
http://www.clearcommerce.com/
We're happy with the stuff we're using for the fog creek shop, but we're secretive about what we use for security reasons. Call me if you want details.
Our main problem seems to be that just when we find someone good, they go out of business. Credit-card processors, server hosting, you name it. Ugh.
Make sure you find out what you can about the vendor's long-term viability, and how easily you can get your data if the financial shit hits the fan.
at work we use bank of america's system... seems to work well. I don't know about the details of the transaction fees though.
I haven't used it but I hear Mal's ecommerce offers a reasonable amount of control and flexibility:
http://www.mals-e.com/
If you want third party billing, 2checkout has a pretty good rep.
If you're looking for merchant accounts, check out Authorize.net.
I've heard nothing but good things about Wells Fargo's programs (they are an Authorize.net reseller).
I'll give a 'third' on the authorize.net -- they're very good at communicating issues with their system, and the've been around since the veritable dawn of time.
I would definately steer clear of any Cardservices International products. I wasn't real happy with the products, getting customer service was difficult, and they new nothing about the eCommerce. They have individual agents that seemingly dissappear once they have taken your money...
It has been a while though. Maybe they fired everybody and started over.
Not sure what you're trying to do, but I use eSellerate (http://www.esellerate.net) to accept payments for one of my applications, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Anil:
We have been incredibly satisfied with -- believe it or not -- the Yahoo store. If you buy a subscription to the new Epicurious paid email product, you buy it via the Yahoo store. We also used it at Style. It's simple, inexpensive, reliable.
Yahoo Stores was developed by Paul Graham's company Viaweb. Yes, Paul Graham of Lisp and "A Plan for Spam" fame. The backend is almost all Lisp.
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Lukas, what a great link! Thanks for the info. And Jeff, I've heard many times that Yahoo Stores are great, and I believe it, but they're unfortunately not very useful for integrating into an actual application.
Terrific for merchandise, though.
K5 uses Cardservice, despite hearing mixed reviews of it. It's a big ugly banking type company, so it has some of the problems you'd expect from that (yes, you are just a number to them), but I've had very little trouble with them overall. The whole credit card processing system is a nightmare, but that will be the same with anyone -- it's not the merchant bank's fault.
I feel pretty secure with CSI having customer info, and they provide good transaction logging and tracking stuff, and a very nice web-based transaction console for things like returns or manual transactions. I had as little difficulty as could be expected integrating Scoop with their perl wrapper, and it's worked fine after I go the initial bugs hammered out.
In the UK I use Worldpay. They are the best of British. Bucks.net I've used without a problem too.
I'd recommend Paymentech, but it could have something to do with the fact that I work there. Most mom and pops (and fly by nights) are actually reselling our service, along with Authorize.net and friends. We own two backends, Paymentech Tampa and Paymentech Salem, and the same family who owns Paymentech also runs FDMS, meaning less drama in the process of getting paid. APIs for any language you can imagine, along with a slew of prepackaged solutions for the web, too.
We have a few systems running CCBill for a back end. SO far it has all been pretty good. They have been reliable for 3+ years for us now, the interface is trivial and the money shows up on time.
I worked in Bank of America's Merchant department. I'm unsure of their rates but they have EXCELLENT customer service and prompt payments.
My father-in-law started a business doing this. (National Bank Drafting Systems) but then sold it last year. It was a big long messy event. He's trying to start up a new business doing the same type of thing.
Good luck. I know my father-in-law's business did well simply because there weren't many other companies that offered the same services.
Wesley, you have never been at the other end of dealing with Paymentech. Sure it must be nice to work at Paymentech (also known as First Data or card service), but been a customer is a horrible experience. They take your money without even talking to you to get the issue resolved. They don't call you for months on end once they have your money. Hint to all Merchant, go with someone who actually assign you a merchant representative, and once you receive your money move it right out to a different account otherwise they will grab with they can from any account they have access to.