o’neill media

If you evolve past the google adsense stage in your Internet career, one of the first dire situations you are bound to face off against is the third-party payment processor. He is a clever foe that does little and takes a lot. The lowest fees that I have seen on the Internet have been about 2.18% and a fixed fee of about 0.24 cents.

I have worked with a few of these companies, and the experience has been painless overall. The one thing you should definitely be aware of is that these guys usually claim that they will be able to process your application in a couple days. I have applied or helped people apply for three different accounts. One was through Yahoo! Small Business, the processor they use is Paymentech. The process was overall painless, and the account was set-up in hours. I have heard some negative things about these guys though, they are big and established, which is a great thing, but buyer beware. I have read that if you go near your montly sales limit, it is painful to get them to have them raise your limit, which obviously leads to lost sales.

I have also had the pleasure of working with Advanced Credit Systems for productdose. They were a little slow to process my account, but they eventually were able to, and ended up being quite helpful.

The final processor I worked with has definitely been one of the worst companies I have worked with in my short time as an entreprenuer. The company is Charge National, they’ve got low-rates. They are that 2.18% company I had mentioned earlier, but man do they suck. They have blatantly lied to me on several occassions, the people won’t get back to you when you have questions, and has actually cost the company I worked with thousands of dollars in lost sales. Just goes to show you deal with a company that is not on top of it, things can really get bad. This isn’t brain surgery either, I just don’t get how businesses in this day and age can get away with such poor service. Well that’s why we have blogging, to let people decipher the crap from the good companies.

Last thing I will mention is gateways. I didn’t know any of this stuff a couple months ago, and am probably still a relative novice, but this is pretty much a comoditized business. So if you want to go with someone like Verisign be my guest, but I still have not seen the value in paying more for this service than, needed. Just make sure that it has the functionality you need. For instance, a big provider Authorize.net has such little functionality that I had to switch out. I eventually moved productdose over to PayJunction seems like a great little company now, but I’ll keep you updated.