[ic] VeriSign Payflow Pro

[Bob Ramstad]

Howdy.  Just a few comments about VeriSign Payflow Pro as there may be
some confusion.

VeriSign Payflow Pro is NOT a merchant account.  Rather, it is an
Internet payment gateway service which works with a variety of
merchant banks.  (VeriSign does have a partnership with a large
merchant bank to offer merchant accounts, but this is something which
is completely separate from Payflow Pro.)

Many larger merchant banks have their own Internet payment gateway
service.  Some of them charge extra for it.  Some of them charge
nothing for it.  Some of them have good services, some of them are not
so good.  (Good = secure, reliable, fast, easy to implement.)

We use VeriSign Payflow Pro ourselves.  Our merchant bank is
NOVA/Onset.  

The flat monthly fee for sending transactions through VeriSign is
fairly low -- I think something like $60 for a large number of
transactions (5000?) per month.

The Internet payment gateway offered by Nova/Onset had a $0.05 per
transaction fee, and since we do about 2000 per month, it was actually
cheaper to use VeriSign.

Also, VeriSign offers eFalcon fraud scoring, which is relatively
inexpensive ($0.15 per transaction) and we've found it useful.

All that said, I will say that since mid May, we've had three problems
with processing cards with VeriSign, and the customer service isn't
great.  YMMV.  It does bring up the obvious point, though, which is
that you get what you pay for... if you are using a freebie gateway
with semi-unsupported software that came from the merchant bank, and
all the cards for a day somehow don't end up settling in your bank
account, is there someone you can call or email with the problem that
can actually help you?

(For those who are wondering, we have a system built in PHP3 which
queues up approved credit cards and allows us to review each order
manually for fraud before doing delayed captures.  We don't currently
run IC, though we will be someday, and so I don't have any tips on how
to set up VeriSign Payflow Pro to do automatic card processing through
IC.)

-- Bob