Can someone explain merchant accounts - the cost, the purpose, and some good companies? Can someone explain what a payment gateway is? - cost, purpose, and good companies? Can someone explain to me, if I want to charge a membership fee for my site, recurring, what will I need? Thanks
1) merchant accounts allow you to accept credit card and debit payments like paypal. 2) Payment gateway is like paypal you are only charged a small percentage as a fee 3) You can use paypal for this and invoice people every 30 days or so.
1) merchant accounts are usually business or corporate accounts having almost all kinds of recieving and sending facilities. 2) payment gateway may be thought of as a resting place for ur e-currency. The best is alertpay...it offers the most diverse feature and effective in most countries while paypal has a huge list of non-allowed countries. Moreover alertpay transaction disputes can be solved easily and they offer low fees and the most diverse options. 3)U need to have a business account in alertpay...its free to open and very little fees...you can make them subscribe to thier alertpay account so that the membership fees are automatically deducted from their account if they dont cancel the subscription....
They pretty much covered the merchant account part. It's basically a relationship with a processor that allows you to accept credit cards. A payment gateway is basically a method of linking a website to the merchant account. Payment gateways often have what's called a virtual terminal which would allow the business to manually enter transactions. In a nutshell, the difference between a 3rd party processor (like paypal, 2checkout.com, etc..) is that instead of you having the relationship with the processor, you are essentially processing on Paypal's merchant account. Paypal is ultimately responsible for chargebacks and fraud. With a merchant account, you are responsible. Recurring payments either require a payment gateway that supports them. You would enter a transaction into the gateway and the interval you want to charge the customers. The gateway would attempt to charge them according to the schedule. Or Paypal and other 3rd party processors also supports this but it must be initiated by the customer. As a Paypal merchant you cannot add someone to a recurring plan manually.