Accepting Payments by card online

[Tony KayIts only spilt milk, the cat will have it.....]

Can anyone tell me how I would go about setting such thing up?

I have access to a secure server, but I don't know how I would process the payments, or even how I would go about setting such a thing up.

Any information gratefully received.

 

[paw862]

Hi,

We use paypal quite a lot to accept credit ard payments from all over the world for Gite rental. I add the extra 2% to the rental to cover the use and leave the deposit amount in the online account to refund after the rental. Never had any problems.

PAW

[Woollybacks<br>J & G ...<font color = blue><a target=_blank href=http:www.woollywraps.comstoreDefault.asp><br>www.woollywraps.com<A> <br><br>]

You might also want to take a look at:

http://www.protx.com/

Haven't used them but they have been recommended to us

Paypal is good and direct bank transfers are another way.

[Tony KayIts only spilt milk, the cat will have it.....]

thanks to you both for that.

[mascamps.com]

It's a doddle with paypal and I gather equally easy with nochex.co.uk (UK cards only).

I use the paypal mail wizard to reply to enquiries which lets people click on a link and pay their deposit. Note that you need to quote a UK address for paypal's message to your clients to come out in english. In my experience, the French have never used paypal to pay me so the UK address is quite important.

One thing to watch is not to put a paynow button on your website for bookings as there's no easy way to check that the dates are available before they pay, hence my use of the mail wizard.

 

Arnold

 

[Tony KayIts only spilt milk, the cat will have it.....]

Thanks Arnold

I had a look at your site and it's seems to be geared up for people to just type in the card details. Is this done through paypal also, or am I missing the plot?
(I'm certainly losing it, that's for sure! )

[mascamps.com]

We've two ways of booking through the site.

The original one was that people mailed us to check availability etc. and we'd use the paypal wizard to create the reply asking for the appropriate deposit. If you mail me directly, I'll create a reply like that for you so you can see what it looks like in real life.

Then we thought that online reservations were a good idea so we added the "book now" link. What this does is link through to a reservation service which in turn has our availability and makes instant online confirmations.

We've been running both systems on the site for about six months or so now and there's a pretty even split between the bookings received by each. In practice most people booking within a week or two will use the "book now" link whereas those booking further ahead normally use the enquiry facility.

The people that we currently use to implement the book now link charge 10% a booking which probably sounds a bit expensive but we think that we get significantly more bookings as a result of being able to issue confirmations online.

 

Arnold

 

[Tony KayIts only spilt milk, the cat will have it.....]

I agree with you about having the 'book now' facility. I suppose that 10% of a 400 quid booking adds up pretty quickly and does seem steep, but by the same token it doesn't sound too bad for 40 or 50 euros

Can I ask who you use?

[Tony KayIts only spilt milk, the cat will have it.....]

I've just been having a look at www.Nochex.com which can be used for taking credit card payments online with a fee of 2.6% and a 20p transaction fee. That seems very reasonable to me.

The only downside is that only transactions on UK credit cards can be processed, which isn't a problem if the bulk of your customers are in the UK.

The other thing is that if they are NOT a member of Nochex, they can pay up to 100 pounds on any given day, so long as you are a member of xtra at nochecks.

Sounds ideal for taking deposits.

Has anyone used it?

 

[mascamps.com]

I've heard a few people that use nochex. The downside is that you'd need to have a paypal (or similar) account as well to accept the non-UK cards. There's also worldpay but I think you need to be doing card payments on a much grander scale than us tiddlers for it to be economic.

Paypal doesn't accept all cards either as I'd originally thought. In particular it doesn't accept those issued in the likes of Latvia and Lithuania which has affected us way down here near Perpignan so I guess that it would affect people further north more.

In practice, we find that more and more people are just faxing us their card details for the deposit and the French always send a cheque. That's the best way assuming that you've got a credit card machine as it costs you under 1% and it's straight into your bank account too (you need "vente a distance" enabled on your machine to do this).

Some people use bank transfers; if you do, quote them the number of a savings account for added security for you.

 

Arnold

 

[mascamps.com]

We use webresint.com, essentially because we already had a contract with them for their reservation system so it was a doddle to just drop them a line and then put the link on our page when it was ready to go.

There are other systems that'll let you do online reservations from your site like that (very much recommended as people like to be able to book there and then so you get more reservations). I've sort-of been looking around for a cheaper one as I've been getting a fair number of reservations through that link but so far the only one I found that was cheaper told me that they weren't recommending it at the moment as it wasn't working properly. However, now I know that it's possible to do it for 3% a go (at least in principle) I will be spending time this winter looking for one.

 

Arnold