Credit card payments yes or no??

One of my clients wants to have credit card payments for an one time event. As I see it right now, it's not feasible.
Due to
A/ deadline - 7th of august (need to select a merchants and get approved)
btw is a merchant the same as a payment service provider(PSP)?
B/ Their server is not secure yet, need to get a SSL ceritficate
C/ Main issue: costs, as a merchants/PSP wants a monthly fee and SSL certificates costs money as well

What's your opinion??

 

The guy receiving the money is the merchant, the people offering the merchant account are the PSP.

With that deadline he can forget about doing it in house. You have to be VISA accredoted etc which requires having an offline server for card details storage. It also costs a few grand to get verified.

Solution: Get a 3d party merchant solution. I can highly recommend WorldPay. (.com) - You can be set up this week, don't need SSL (it's hosted on their server but you can fully customize the looks) and if you can negotiate well, they'll waive the setup fees which reduces cost down to a few euros a month + transaction costs. With their code samples you can have it set up by tonight if you kow PHP.

 

Another problem is that most merchant account providers wont setup a business for a one-time event. There is too much risk for any normal processor to allow one-time businesses to accept credit cards through them. I also have to recommend using a 3rd party processor.

 

You can try Paypal.

http://www.paypal.com

Thomas