Payment processing - online stores
 

What do you guys prefer to do for payments? I'd be very interested to see what you do if you host in Australia and take payments covering this sort of range $10-$10000.

More details required for answer. What are you selling, and for what price? Is the location of your business in the US or Oz? US citizens and residents can now get high risk merchant accounts for next to nothing.

We are selling systems and components, specialized computer hardware etc up to about $50,000. Based in oz.

I'm not an expert, first off. When you say $50K, do you mean that you're actually selling a thing that costs $50K? The best piece of advise I can give you is you're going to have to call some credit card processors and talk to them. Call more than one, and comparison shop and try to get them to lower their rates a bit. Be prepared to provide professional references for the application process--they're probably going to be a more than a little scared of transactions in the $50k range.

For my non-adult business, I use these guys. http://www.eftsecure.com/. They seem to be pretty good, have very responsive tech support, and allow online and terminal transactions. They also have ACH transactions. Which, is going to be a lot cheaper for your large transactions. ACH transactions are cheaper than credit cards in the non-adult world for some reason. I don't know why.

So, I'd start by contacting http://www.eftsecure.com/ and asking them questions. Again, since you're not in US, these guys might not be able to help.

Thanks for the tips.

I was in touch with a bank today and they got me on the track of setting up an online merchant account.

I'm new to this myself. I have an offline merchant account at my disposal with which i can process credit cards offline.. with or without the card, eftpos (electronic funds transfer point of sale, etc) but unfortunately this did not seem to come with any online functionality.

To process the transactions i need either an OCA setup (Online Credit Authorisation) which interfaces to a third party IPG, or we can purchase and host our own IPG (internet payment gateway)to process in realtime ourselves with a direct link to the bank.

When i say 50k i mean we have products of that value to sell, i doubt we'd sell much online for that value without more human contact, handshakes etc.

I'd expect most transactions to be $100-$5000.