Payment Gateway / Merchant Account

[Guest]

Hi Chaps,

I'm building an online store, and have got to the point where I need some info about Payments.

The site is in PHP and have already got a cart set up, so just need to accept credit cards and process them to a bank account.

Does anyone have any information or preference on the best service provider to use, level of easiness on integration?

I'm after a service provider that doesn't require redirection to a third party website (like PayPal), and we can't apply for PayPal Web Payments Pro, so something that would 'stay' within the site would be awesome.

Any info would be a great help.

[Guest]

Merchant accounts' availability is greatly depends on the country.

In US, there are many payment processors (authorize.net, cdgcommerce, mivamerchant to name a few) that will do the hard work for you for a monthly fee, but you have to be a US citizen and/or have a US business entity (ITN, SSN etc.) OR you need to have business/personal bank account in a US bank.

I suggest you to search local options, talk to banks if they provide merchant accounts with payment gateways.

As a last resort, check out WorldPay. Their fees are a bit high, but they are in businesss for quite a while, and they accept merchants from around the world.

[Payments_Expert · Accepted solution]

While handling the payment process within your application is nice from a control point of view, there can be some downside in that you have to worry about being compliant with the PCI data security standards.  Specifically you would need to comply with the pci pa-dss standard.   More info here:   https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pa_dss.shtml  In order to minimize and possibly even eliminate your application from the comliance and audit requirements of pci pa-dss you will want to leverage a level 1 pci compliant payment gateway such as http://www.paymentsgateway.com to process your transactions.   They have a couple of different integration solutions such as SWP Checkout which can process your CC items securely without all the headaches of pci.