

Ask HN: What's the best way to accept credit cards online? - mis

Hello!<p>I'm setting up a new internet service which will require a lot of small transactions from users. I'd like to accept credit cards.. what's the best way to go about this? Are there premiums involved?<p>Alternately, does anybody have any experience using a Paypal/Google Checkout combination?
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aneesh
Short answer: There's no free lunch here. Whoever processes credit cards for
you will take a small cut.

Long answer: See the following discussions

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470128>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389692>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115723>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010>

Also, if you _store_ your customers' credit card information, you have to do
implement all sorts of access & privacy controls, a ritual otherwise known as
PCI compliance. You probably don't want to go through all that trouble.

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kaiserama
I have used PayPal and Google Checkout on a site, if you sign up for the
business/payments pro version of PayPal you'll be able to collect payments in
2 ways on your site. Either via PayPal payment, or credit card. The credit
card payment can be transparent to the user if you are either using a shopping
cart with PayPal integrated or if you know how to program against the PP API,
or can transfer to PP and complete a CC transaction there. The Google Checkout
option will require the purchaser to have a Google Checkout Account. This is
typically a slight deterrent as it requires someone to create a new account
which can sometimes be considered a PITA.

Either way many sites typically support multiple payment methods. But if
you're talking about small transaction sizes you may want to do some research
into micro payment processors. Not sure how far along they are but one that
had been mentioned a long long time ago was NOCA. Think the site is NOCA.com.
But there are others.

Good luck.

oh and yes there are always premiums involved. If you go with PP the fee for
payments pro is like $20/mo + ~3% + $.30/transaction. Services like
Authorize.net and Cybersource will have slightly lower transactional rates but
higher monthly fees.

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mis
Thanks, you guys have been very helpful. Good starting resources here.

