I am working on creating a donation ware system where users will be able to sign up and donate to charity organizations. The system is as follows: 1. User registers 2. Selects the organization from our database 3. Uses his/her credit card or echeck to pay 4. My website transfers the money to organization's back account I am very confused over secure money processing of this system. I would prefer an immediate transfer of money to the organization's bank account but would consider if something simple and transparent idea shows up. In need some advice from you all. Thank you. Appreciate your help.
I totally recomend PayPal. With charity organizations and these types of donations, familiarity is often critical to trust and success when soliciting donations. PayPal works extremely well for this. i also believe they have a feature where your new members can choose a monthly payment option (for example: donate $10 each month automatically).
Thanks nonfy, But doesnt that mean every organization needs to have a paypal account? If I try to put al lthe money in my paypal account and then transfer to organizations, there would be too much service fee involved and would be difficult to build trust. I was thinking of something that will ensure the money gets deposited to the organization's bank account or kinda of an automated system. Thanks for your inputs. I will try to research a little more with paypal but more ideas are highly appreciated.
What you're try to do is called factoring or aggregating. Unfortunately, it's very difficult and expensive to setup a processing account as this type of business. There is a very large potential for fraud and loss with this type of processing. As far as I know of, the only way to setup this type of merchant account is either directly through Visa and Mastercard or by going through an offshore credit card processor that supports aggregate merchant accounts.
This is somewhat of the "big" thing for the merchant account processors, getting churches, etc to set up a merchant account. It would be better if each user had their own account as jetstep pointed out. Otherwise, you will run into problems setting it up. The larger processors are somewhat still merging, buying eah other out so it would be very simple for the charity to have a merchant account. The transaction can be broken down into about seven steps Authorization Merchant Balancing Capture Capture Interchange (V/MC Only) Interchange (V/MC Only) Merchant ACH The electronic payment gateway will virtually connect your website to a transaction processor. The transaction processors (i.e. First Data, Nova, etc) are usually the companies that are in the background of the transaction. Nova, for example, is considering buying out one of their affiliates and possibly changing their name to help brand themselves. Most people in the business have heard of these companies but some people never have heard of them, but probably have used them in a transaction at least once. For example, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, McDonald's are some companies that rely on the First Data platform for credit card transactions and gift cards and stored value cards.