When setting up the Baba Beag website, one of the initial things I needed to do was to decide how to process transactions. If you’re only an online seller the likelihood is that you won’t have a machine to process transactions. Although Ive talked to a few seller who do. You need to ask yourself what kind of experience do you want users to your site to have. That being, do you want them to be taken out of your site environment and branding to be processed by paypal or world pay or some other payment provider or do you want to do it within the structure of your own site. For my site, I felt that paypal et al didn’t suit the business. I dont like being re-directed to externals even if they are bona fide (that maybe a personal thing) also, making your customers register with someone else before they can purchase never seemed to make sense to me.
I decided to go with Realex, which is an Irish company that handles payments. In fairness they have been good re: customer service – depending on volumes of transactions it may or may not make sense for small businesses. They charge a flat rate every quarter – and if you’re transaction numbers correlate to the amounts they allow for within this payment, then you’re getting a good rate – I think its 20 cent per txn, but if you have few transactions then your costs can be high. So you need to think about how many transactions you are likely to process and then examine the packages that each of the providers offer.
You also need to get a merchant account set up to in order to process your txns in to your business account. But that can be the subject of another post.
Tags: Baba Beag, Online Transactions, Payment Gateways, Selling Online
