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

[mis]

Hello!

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?

Alternately, does anybody have any experience using a Paypal/Google Checkout combination?

[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.

[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.

[mis]

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