Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Yahoo Store vs. OpenACS Ecommerce?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Why would you expect to be able to do credit card settlement without having your own merchant account? I wouldn't expect a small ISP offering LAMP e-commerce, in particular, to offer a paypal-like service. And paypal removes much of the consumer protection benefits of traditional credit-card payments, so a "good" merchant probably wants to be do "real" credit-card settlement anyway.

And most real merchants with real stores already have a merchant account anyway, doesn't your small bakery-ownding friend accept VISA payments already? If so, the extra cost comes from the transaction fee associated with the online payment gateway (remember, no mom-and-pop ISP is going to be allowed on the internal bank network used by VISA etc).

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Yahoo portrays themselves as one stop shopping for small business owners, yet they obscure the fact that your actual costs with them are going to be about twice what they advertise. Obviously, I myself was until recently mostly ignorant of how small-business credit card processing really works, but I have to think that this lack of forthrightness must have confused more than a couple mom and pop operations.

No, this small bakery does not currently accept credit card payments at all, and never has over their many years of operation. That's my understanding anyway.