I personally think it is the best payment gateway out there. It is the most widely used, and the cost is very reasonable for a high quality service.
I'll agree with that. It's also the easiest to integrate into a website which is no small thing to consider.
Its actually depends on your actual need and preferably your location, you do have many other option to check like 2chekout, cdgcommerce, chronopay, worldpay, moneybookers, ccnow, protx, googlecheckout etc, my point is before making your final decision you should check the prices of few payment solution providers and have a look who can best meet your requirement and needs.
If you are in the US a true merchant account with a payment gateway like Authnet is going to be better then any of the above solutions pretty much every time in terms of cost and flexibility. (Obvious exception to Google Checkout which is currently free through the end of the year although it isn't very flexible).
Thanks for the replies, may be I will use it as a second payment option(Usually I use 2-3, I like to have more ways for pay)
Google checkout makes a great alternative payment method. We implemented it over a year ago and after about 2 weeks, it outweighs paypal purchases. I'm not sure what part your disagreeing on. It doesn't offer any form of API payment that allows visitors to stay on your website, which makes it inflexible and unusable for a good deal of ecommerce sites. The API that it does offer is fairly robust, but it is a complete pain to integrate with. It is free until the end of the year, and if you are already an adwords advertiser, the cost can be greatly reduced just from advertising cost that are applied to GCO fees.
I personally believe that Authorize.Net is the best payment processor out there. Not to mention the 2 benefits: the money is placed directly into your BANK account (usually within' 24 hours) and the entire sale takes place from your website. The charges/fees are sometime good, for instance, 2.29% and .30 cents isn't all that bad compared to PayPal 2.9% the last I checked. So selling an item for $400.00 will give you $390.54 (taking $9.56 for the fees.) With PayPal, that'd equal to $388.10 --- not much, but atleast your saving time (that it would take to send from PayPal to your bank account or withdrawal fees using your PayPal ATM Card) and saving a few dollars.
plimus Rank: 22,708 Authorize.Net Rank 7,248 Of course that doesnt mean anything, but obviously more people use authorizenet
I use Authorize.net and will probably incorporate Google Checkout to give customers more options. I haven't had any problems with Authorize.net that I recall.
What are you using now? If you are using another electronic payment gateway (like LinkPoint or Payflow) chances are you really do not need it. Some companies have a second gateway just in case the gateway itself (Hack Attack Gums Up Authorize.Net) - usually the gateway might be down for a few seconds and most companies do not realize it