Problem Obtaining Credit Card Processing

[myukmail]

Hi guys,
We run a mail forwarding company, My UK Mail Ltd (www.my-uk-mail.co.uk). We also offer Order Fulfilment services for businesses, but we are not necessarily after credit card processing for this service, as it involves higher sums of money.

We've been using PayPal to accept credit card payments, but have an urgent need for real credit card processing facilities. Customers in non-PayPal countries understandably do not want to fiddle around with cheques, and a virtual terminal would really come in handy.

We so far have applied to WorldPay and Fasthosts E-Merchant. WorldPay rejected us because we offer "postal delivery" which is at "a high risk of chargebacks" according to the staff there. I was informed that this policy was across all of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, so Streamline would not be able to help either. Natwest, our bank, also declined an Internet Merchant ID for the same reason.

Fasthosts have not given a reason for decline, only that we do not meet their credit scoring criteria. They state they only use public domain information from Companies House, so possibly this could be down to our recent incorporation (7th November), as we were previously trading as a Sole Trader.

Could anybody recommend any other credit card processing facilities, or offer any advice or information?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Tin]

Hi there

I use Barclays for my e-commerce credit card handling but I don't have a bank account with them and didn't when I applied for their merchant services. Early days yet but I think they're good, they don't hold on to your money as long as other merchant accounts and they were certainly cheaper in terms of setup costs and monthly charges than my current business bank.

I couldn't recommend Fasthosts, I used their reseller services for around 4 years and they just got more & more expensive with all sorts of charges that seemed to sneak in through the back door, I did consider them (for about 2 seconds) when I was looking for a merchant account as they'd just opened their newly launched merchant services with The Bank of Ireland around the same time but decided to shop elsewhere (wisely in my mind)!

Just a thought, are you offering postal delivery of goods to an address other than the card holders address, this could be seen as a problem by merchant account providers and if so could you not change your delivery practice to one of card holders address only?

Hope this helps

Cheers

Ray

[www.t6c.co.uk]

nochex.com is excellent for transactions under £100...

[DotNetWebs]

nochex.com is excellent for transactions under £100...

NOCHEX are great, we us them for a couple of projects. One problem that may affect you though is that they will only handle UK credit/debit cards.

[Toon]

I use Bank of Scotland. I have an Internet account and a terminal. They know I do mail order and are happy to do business with me.

[quotes4]

This is such a big problem in the UK. Many of my clients are now setting up some form of on-line payment and getting their Internet Merchant accounts is a huge hurdle for them and unfortunately there is little we as web designers can do to help them.
Metacharge is another IM that you could try but they told me recently that they no longer approve businesses who don't expect to do more than £5000 worth of business through them each month.
You also have to be wary of their chargeback costs (for all IM providers) as the amount of fraud on-line is increasing and each fraudulent purchase will cost you around £15.
Personally, i'm advising my clients to get a standard merchant account and a credit card machine and take the online payments using an encrypted email. That way you avoid the payment gateway costs and can sift out the potential fraudulent claims before processing the credit card. It costs more to set up (around £300 per year for an SSL and a static IP address) and you'll need to have some development work done to encrypt the orders but it's worth it in my view.