Acting as your own gateway/processor?

I am thinking of starting a website that serves a specific niche's credit card processing.

Basically how the site would work is they would sign up, input what products they offer, and then would be able to use our site as a virtual register allowing them to input people's cards and charge them from the site.

I would be making money from taking a percentage of each sale.

This means that I want to maximize the percentage I get when they charge money.

My question is, how difficult is it to begin acting as your own processor/gateway? Does anyone know the basic steps? About how much it would cost?

Any information helps at this point. Thank you in advance!

 

Things may have changed, but when a client of mine wanted to do this a few years ago, it was EXTREMELY difficult, because most merchant accounts do not allow this. If I understand what you're saying and what the credit card companies told us, they consider any use of this type to be factoring, and very seriously forbid it.

Of course, I don't run a credit card company and I'm not a lawyer, but by starting with this basic information, maybe you can investigate whether what you want to do can be done, where and how. Don't know if this helps, but hopefully it won't hurt, at least

 

it is really dfficult. I think you can use google checkout instead of going for this.

 

I suppose you're looking to work as reseller of payment processing company, check out few payment gateways that offering reseller program.

 

Bottom line... I want to get my processing costs down as low as possible... at a 2.39% processing cost with .35 cent transaction cost... I'm down to $.17 per transaction of profit... or just under 1% of the average transaction that people will be charging.

What I want to be able to do is get more of each transaction... instead of 1%... 2% or 3%.

I'm assuming to get rates this low, you must do your own processing and gateway.

How does paypal act as their own gateway and processor? Is that difficult to do?

Is there another way to get the fees down or a company that offers lower fees than authorize.net or the like?

 

If you want to cut out the middle man then try to get a Visa or Mastercard merchant account directly from your bank.

 

You are looking to "Factor" as someone else has already pointed out, unless you have big bucks this isnt going to happen. If you really want to do this inhouse, you can pull it off, I did with eBanx years ago.

You can get the basic engine from a company called CommsXL then you just need to create a web interface.
Thats the technical side, then you need to get one of the banks on side.

Good luck, and if your truly serious feel free to PM me.