Nigeria

[dnhp]

1st - this forum is a great tool... WELL DONE!!!

We've been considering payment gateways to fully automate the credit card transaction process. Currently, we use a service, which is semi-automatic, requiring us to copy and paste information into a website to obtain an authorisation number and this is then batch processed at the end of the day to our bank account automatically. One advantage of this is we get many obviously fraudulent transactions mainly from Nigeria and elsewhere which we simply choose to ignore. However, as the card information given is correct, albeit stolen from the genune cardholder, if this process was automatic, it would remove the option not to process the transaction and we would end up having the transaction reversed later.

I was wondering what experiences other merchants have with Payment Gateways and fraudulent transactions. Also is the high percentage fee worth it?

Cheers,

Nick Blakesley
www.discountnaturalhealth.com

[GlennM]

Hi Nick,

A site I used to manage used WorldPay as the credit card processor. From memory they charged 4% to 4.5% of the transaction and then had a $16US fee any time we made a transfer to our bank account, didn't matter if it was $50 or $5,000.

The good thing with them is that we were able to do a payment that was either approved or declined in the first instance, and if it was approved by WorldPay I then had five days to "finalise" the transaction. If I thought the transaction was bogus for whatever reason I could "decline" it or do nothing and it would cancel out after the five days.

The bad thing with them is that they hold the money for a minimum 30 days in case of chargebacks.

Was it worth the fee's? Well it was for us as we were selling to the US market and it was the only way we could have the site setup in $US etc. We also didn't need a "merchant" bank account, they just did all that and transferred the money to a nominated Australian bank account at the end of the 30 days (providing they reached our nominated transfer limit).

Glenn

[dferguson]

Hi Nick

Our stats show that most of you use the manual (non real time) method - So I dont know how many people on the forum will be able to help you out!

I think the reason that this is the case is because of the things you mentioned:- less control, more costly etc.