[LRUG] Credit card processing in the UK

[George Palmer]

I've been through this recently with the added pain of wanting to
charge in US Dollars.  After much LRUG love, we went with RealEx as a
gateway and who recommended FirstData as a merchant account.  We ended
up going with as they could offer the best rates for US dollar
transactions although from conversations on the phone they weren't the
most helpful.  The way we work it is to do a $1 auth and void when the
customer enters their card details and then vault the card for future
charging.  This works well and you're free to charge whatever you want
on future charges so long as the customer has agreed to the prices on
your site.  Obviously if you went silly with this the banks fraud
system would kick in but for grabbing a card details and letting the
customer change plan, and therefore cost, it works really well.

With respect to our gateway I wouldn't say our experience has been
good - first they failed to setup the gateway merchant account link
properly (meaning a 2 week delay hours before launching), then they
made a code change that stopped US payments working for British
customers (I had alert them to this) and they've spent two weeks
tracking down why a card payment won't go through (still not got a
answer on this).  My issue isn't so much that things are going wrong
(although 3 issues in 6 months is very concerning and enough to make
me now be actively looking to change - suggests welcome), but more how
they are handling the problems.  There doesn't seem to be a ticket
tracking system, you can never get hold of the same person and I'm
constantly wondering who, or if anyone is dealing with my request.
Things I have been asked to try recently include altering the order of
my XML and running their code on my server.  Needless to say these
have not impressed me one bit.  More worrying than these is perhaps
that their general problem solving doesn't seem that great - I
couldn't understand why they were bothered with the XML when the bank
was clearly refusing the transaction.  The other thing that pains me,
and this is true of lots of sites more generally, is the marketing
site is slick but the actual interface you have to use awful.  That
said I know many people who have running happily with them for years
so your milage may vary.  I expect a lot of our issues have occurred
because we charge in US dollars.

In terms of FirstData they offered us by far the best rate although
the above approach does have the problem of the payments being
unverified, ie not using verified by visa.  Once I had overcome the
hurdle of explaining why this would be the case (I'm not asking my
customers to verify their transactions each month using a verified by
visa box), they were able to beat quotes from Barclays and HSBC.
Expect to pay more for unverified and US dollar transactions - we pay
in the region of 2.6%.  FirstData are also massively unhelpful - 2
months after setting up we still hadn't got an AMEX merchant account
so I kept calling to find out why.  It turns out they lost the forms
twice, then decided they couldn't send them on to AMEX and finally
decided that the forms had arrived just 2 minutes before I called
(what an amazing coincidence, lost for two months and get found just
when I call!).  After several calls I gave up - asked to speak to the
complaints department (they don't have one) or a manager (they
wouldn't transfer me).  So I told them to not progress the AMEX
application any further and signed up with them direct.  They were
very helpful but do charge a £120 annual fee to take foreign payments
which is kind of annoying but I haven't found anyone whos managed to
avoid it.

Anyway just my 2c - hope that helps.  Let me know if want any more specifics,

George
-- 
George Palmer
@georgio_1999
http://www.digitaldeliveryapp.com



On 7 August 2012 09:09, J. Pablo Fernández <pupeno at pupeno.com> wrote:
> Hello rubists!
>
> My startup is getting closer to the point when we start charging. Yay! So...
> Any recommendation on a merchant, or however you'd call such a provider,
> that would store the CC number for me and allow me to place a charge of
> variable amounts every month? Yeah, I know, the trickiest of the cases. The
> most promising companies offering these types of services that I found all
> fail at the geographic level: they are US-centric and can't operate in the
> UK.
>
> Thanks.
> --
> J. Pablo Fernández <pupeno at pupeno.com> (http://pupeno.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>