Forum OpenACS Q&A: The Crazy World of Payment Service Providers

My latest attempt at finding a) a PSP which is compatible with OACS without me having to spend money on getting someone to write a module. b) accepts payment is UK Sterling and will deposit into UK Sterling accounts. Has been thwarted by Planet Payments, who despite meeting both criteria have informed me that their underwriters wont allow me to sell 'CPUs', or in British English 'full computer systems'. Not being able to accept UK debit cards already made a big difference to my expected cash needs, but this practicaly kills my business ideas.
Now I am not being tight about not wanting to pay someone to write a module for say, Barclays EPDQ, it is just that I have very limited funds right now, and until I manage to secure funding for my business from Venture Capital, local business finance initiatives or God forbid a bank, I only have enough money to keep treading water selling old Sun systems on ebay and the like. If anybody who has read this painful rant actualy feels sorry for me, dont, I chose this path for myself, but I could do with a little help in finding a PSP who will allow me to make some money for both me and them without trying to strangle me at the same time :(

Regards,

John H.

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Posted by MaineBob OConnor on

Hi John,

We have been using www.securenetshop.com (SNS) for our shopping cart with our openacs 3.x sites for the past 2.5 years. SNS works with multiple creditcard vendors. We recently switched from iPayment Technologies to Cardservice International because Cardservice has a nice virtual terminal that also does automatic recurring billing that we use for our Monthly Membership charges. The switch was instant and the online application for Cardservice only took 2 days from the time I applied to the switchover that I initiated at SNS once CardService approved my app.

So on our site all we do is write <form... html code (not https://) and it directs to the secure SNS shopping cart and checkout... You can accept CCards, Paypal and checks, phone or fax orders... It costs ~ $80 for 3 months or $229 for a year for SNS. They are offering "Free" (no app fees) merchant accounts...

Another neat feature of SNS that I recently got working and really love is the "Silent Post" feature. IF the transction for payment is successful, SNS sends the form data back to my site as <form... post. (NO CC info). This lets me do instant activations and even instant downloads and emails to customers and order tracking tied to our users...

Last week we started selling our first EBook. To see all the steps for yourself short of buying the book, go to
www.greatestnetworker.com/buy/wealthabundancejoy/now/vt/

Note, the first page is the code I wrote, when you click to add to the shopping cart, that is the page provided by SNS...

Let me know if I can answer any questions.

-Bob

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Posted by John Holroyd on
Hi Bob,

It certainly looked an interesting idea, sadly its for US customers only. Thanks for the info though.

Regards,

John

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Posted by David Cohen on
Would Kagi work for you?
Or WorldPay? WorldPay UK's site mentions that they're used by the British Medical Association, Ananova Ltd., Virgin Net, and other British/UK outfits likely more familiar to you than me.
This page lists a bunch of places that might be worth looking into, including: Global Debit Card, Bibit Payment Services, Mondex Smart Card International services and WorldPay, among others.
And then, in a pinch, there's always Paypal.
Good luck.

__
DC
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Posted by Brian Fenton on
You might be interested in this thread: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=72368