Six Payment Gateways Reviewed

[Administrator]

This thread is dedicated to discussing the article: [url=http://www.merchant-account-services.org/article/payment-gateways-reviewed]Six Payment Gateways Reviewed[/url].

[dtynan]

John, thanks for the great article comparing the 6-gateways.

In the article you mention that Linkpoint API has no transaction fee & is resold by others. I'm having a little trouble following that trail ... I found linkpoint.com & the developer-type info there, but beyond that I mostly just seem to find "Cardservice International" (www.cardservice.com), which I think might be a reseller or "something" similar. Cardservice appears to have fairly hefty fees of 25 cents/xaction or 30 cents if you want AVS. I was able to find some ISP or something that appeared to be reselling Cardservice International and had the same rates pretty much. Am I on the wrong track here or did they do away with the free transactions or.....?

FYI, just for background info.....I have been in the process of evaluating authorize.net & wanted to use their recurring billing until I realized that the API didn't support it ... then I went searching around I found your site & saw that they are moving into beta on that now. I *might* be able to wait for that if it really did come out by 2/1/07, but that seems risky...

Thanks!
Dylan Tynan
dtynan@gmail.com

[stymiee]

Dylan,

LinkPoint and CardService International are both owned by the same company, First Data. Cardservice International sales agents resell LinkPoint gateways to their merchants.

As far as how the fees work I'll explain it further. Basically, when you establish a merchant account with a payment gateway you are getting two separate services (although the provider who established your account may try to make it look like one service). These two separate services charge two separate sets of fees. The merchant account will usually have its own transaction fee and the gateway will have one, too. So, let's say your merchant account provider charges 25¢ per transaction. And the gateway they offer charges 10¢ per transaction. Your total cost for each transaction will be 35¢. In the case of LinkPoint, their gateway does not charge a transaction fee. So you only pay the merchant account transaction fee.

As for the Authorize.Net recurring billing API, I wouldn't count on it being ready by February 1st. They haven't set an exact date and beta testing has not yet begun so I would bet it officially launches after that date. But I would still make them your number one choice for recurring billing. They support a batch upload feature which, when built into your site, makes managing new subscriptions easy. Then once they release their API integrating it into your site can be done in as little as an hour.