Card payments for the first time - looking for recommendations

Hi all

What are your recommendations for taking card payments, we are service based business and are getting asked more often if we accept cards, so from what is available on the manage payments page which do you recommend, I like the look of Stripe, thoughts ?

Thank you in advance.

Dave

For PAYG processing the only companies that I can think of are Stripe. Nochex and, of course, Paypal.

I set up with Nochex before Stripe came on the scene so I can’t comment on them but some things that you need to look for are:

  1. Whose name is the account in? Will it be in the business name or your own? This can be a nasty suprise if you set it up using a personal card for validation.

  2. Fee - basic fees are all similar

  3. Chargebacks - how much protection do you have? What is the handling fee? Do they require a retention on your account. (I had to keep a minimum balance on Nochex until I went for about 5 years without a chargeback)

  4. Withdrawals, Manual or automatic. Any minimum amount?

  5. Customer interface. How much coding can you get away with not doing.

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Stripe or PayPal are the easiest options to get set up with as there’s no ongoing subscription cost, just the percentage charge on each transaction. Stripe charges significantly less than PayPal (1.4%+20p as opposed to 3.4%+20p, PayPal advertises a sliding scale as your turnover goes up, Stripe says they offer “volume discounts” but don’t specify what these are, you have to ask them), but PayPal gives you the money faster than Stripe.

The other options (SagePay/WorldPay/Paymentsense) are likely to be cheaper overall if you’re expecting higher turnover, but they have monthly fees and a minimum contract term so you’d have to run the numbers for your own situation to know what’s going to work out best.

Personally I use Stripe for online payments, primarily because the third-party tool I use for my webshop has good Stripe integration out of the box, but online is a relatively small proportion of my turnover at the moment (we’re mainly a retail shop and we use Barclays for face-to-face payments) so the fees aren’t that significant for me yet.

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Ouch, Paypal have put their fees up since I checked them out.

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Thanks for the replies, I’ve gone with Stripe as it seems to offer all I want without the expense of paypal.

Cheers