[ic] UK payment gateways - PROTX et al

[Lyn St George]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003 18:12:48 +0100, Ross McAllister wrote:

>
>Dear list,
>
>  I have recently started my second Interchange site and the usual
>comments about Interchange being a splendid product apply. The first
>site accepts a few payments and processes them via entering the CC
>number manually after opening an encrypted e-mail with the details. 
>
>  The new site will need merchant processing and being in the UK will
>need to work with a UK merchant account. I've trawled the archives and
>talked to Worldpay and looked at the PROTX solution but I can't get a
>definitive answer as to which to go for or if another would be better.
>
>  It seems Worldpay is a limited solution as they want to take the CC
>details on their own pages. Does anyone have a view?

I used to use Worldpay but no longer. They keep on to your funds for
a month which is no good for cash flow, they always seem to find 
some reason to add a niggling little charge on to your account, their
standard fraud prevention amounts to no more than the usual of 
checking that the card is not stolen and that it contains sufficient funds.
Your customer has to leave your site and go to the WP site to make 
payment, which always creates problems with maintaining the session
ID and logging the transaction properly (though it can be done and I 
posted long ago a brief 'howto' on this). And their rate for such an
unsatisfactory job is 4.5%, which is getting close to usury IMHO. 

Protx is an excellent choice, espcially at only 5pence per transaction. Ally
that with a merchant account from LloydsCardnet at a little more than 2% 
and you have the best choice that I know of in the UK. 

As it happens I recently finished a payment module for Protx. It includes
a Virtual Terminal which is integrated into the IC AdminUI (in fact it is 
based very heavily on pages taken from the UI).  It has been running without 
problem in live use on IC 4.9.6, but I have one user who still has problems 
with IC 4.8. When it has been proved on 4.8 then of  course the module will 
be donated to the IC core team, but if you want it in the meantime then 
mail me off-list. 


>Regards and thanks in advance,
>
>Ross McAllister
>ross@4webuk.com 
>
-
Cheers
Lyn St George
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