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I'm working on a project where we collect payments from users using credit/debit/PayPal payments.
The service is taking payments from users on behalf of a 3rd party organisation.
Once we take the payment, minus fees, we want to transfer the amount to the organisations bank account.
For now, what we can do is pay the organisation using Online Banking BACS bank transfer.
But I would like to know if there is a way to do this automatically using an API.
If we need to somehow register the 3rd parties bank account details before making transfers, this is fine.
We just want to automate the whole process, since at the moment the transfer is a manual step.
Are there any gateways or APIs I can use for this? In the UK?
As this is still un-answered I'll throw my hat into the ring.
For the benefit of non-UK users, the UK has a central clearing system called Bacs, which is run by the major banks in the country. However, companies can also makes submissions directly to that clearing system, by using Bacs Software.
There are a number of companies that sell on-premise and online services/APIs that allow you to send money directly via Bacs (and collect Direct Debits).
DISCLAIMER: I currently work for a software company (Bottomline Technologies) which sells a Bacs API - I won't mention the product name and to see alternative companies you can simply Google for 'bacs software api'
Hope this helps
You are going in the wrong direction. You should talk to payment processors (which may or may not include your bank) about the business considerations, which probably are more important than the technological considerations. Generally you can expect something somewhat reasonable that you will (after fiddling with it enough) be able to convince to work. It doesn't matter whether this involves some sort of api library, soap calls, or other communication method.
If you honestly consider having the technological considerations more important than the business considerations, then just go with Paypal and don't write your own shopping cart stuff at all. This is easier to use and will do more of the heavy lifting for you, but which will also probably charge you more.
Once you create a real shopping cart and start handling payments yourself (i.e. taking in CC information and sending it to a payment processor), you start getting into a mess of legal and technical concerns involving PCI compliance and the like, which will apply regardless of your choice of payment processor*.
*This is US-specific, but I bet the UK has something similar.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I didn't know I would be getting too many replies so fast. I can provide more details. It is definitely for use within the company. I was looking for some info on whether I should be more careful or anything to watch out for...
My boss is asking me to put some tracking info on what users do with their application. It is not about collecting sensitive data but there might be some screenshots involved and I am not sure if this is a breach of privacy.
Would love to hear any thoughts on this or if you handled something similar.
At work, there is no privacy. Think of it this way, if you work for a financial institution, or a government one, monitoring users may be the difference between keeping sensitive information secret and not. (I want my personal information kept private). They are paid to do work at work. If they are afraid about what they are doing is wrong, then they shouldn't be doing it.
A comment brought up a good point. If you are selling the product and spying on end users, that is totally different. That is highly unethical to take screen shots and report them back to the company. Actually where I work, we'd have you arrested for it if we found out. (yes, you'd be violating a federal law, and I guarantee we'd go after everyone and sort out the mistakes later.) That is a very slippery slope.
If you mean users at large, yes it's a breach of privacy.
If you mean users internal to your company (workers), then no -- there should be no expectation of privacy in the workplace.
Sometimes it is good to collect some metrics and will help in enhancing the user experience. Once, we were able to prove that a certain functionality was never used and we were able to remove support for it. For screenshots, you should be careful to take only the required window instead of a full screen.
If the application is used internally within your organization, and you have a corporate policy that states "no expectation of privacy" that has been communicated to and signed by your users then there is no issue.
Monitoring the actions of employees within a business in the US is very common practice.
Legal issues aside, do you want to work at a company that takes screenshots of your desktop?
Even if legal, this behavior is sure to drive away developers. Remember, in a bad work environment often the best developers leave first; they have the best job prospects.
Here's a corollary example: would you want your boss taping and listening to phone calls you made from the office? You don't give up every right you have just by cashing a paycheck.
Even if this screen capture methodology is legal, it certainly isn't ethical and will absolutely damage the morale of employees by demonstrating that they cannot be trusted.
It's just a bad idea. There have got to be better ways of accomplishing your goals than this.
Screenshots? If it's not opt-in, I'd say that's a pretty clear breach of privacy.
I made a simple CMS in PHP and I had to store all actions of users, but it's a completely different situation. In my opinion what is asking your boss is a bit out of privacy, especially if in your application you don't mention to the user this kind of behavior.
On a work machine? Absolutely; as long as the users know the extent to which they are being monitored. It's their choice to work for the employer, and they are using the employer's equipment.If you don't notify them that they are being watched, then that is kind of a "grey area"....depending upon state lawss, it may even be illegal - depending on what sort of information you are monitoring.
Something that would help on clarification would be is this an internal company application or something that will be on user's personal computers.
Typically when it comes to computers that are owned by the company, if the company decides to do monitoring, it is their choice. Disclosure of the monitoring is often encouraged in an effort to be open and honest, but is not mandatory. A user should not have any expectation of privacy when using equipment owned and managed by the company.
This is not just a matter of custom built applications, but also web browsing, email, phone conversations, etc. If you are using company resources then you are releasing your privacy.
If this is an application going to users outside of the company, then yes it is wrong without permission by the users.
That is greatly depending on the country you are in and what information you are collecting and what you do with it.
There is a huge difference between the US and EU for instance.
The Law, jurisprudence, union contracts and company policy (when not in contradiction to the above) are what determines what is acceptable.
If its for an internal app its completely ethical.
Beyond disclosing to all users that their use of the apps is monitored there is no other obligation of disclosure(excepting federal contracts and union contracts).
What is most important about capturing this kind of data is to focus on capturing the absolute least amount necessary - capturing screenshots of all open windows plus any adjacent data streams does in fact incur liability issues (think HIPPA) as well as producing a mountain of data that no one will ever look thru until a lawyer requests it with a subpoena and you're asked to go thru it and redact all Names, DOB, and SSNs in 160GB of data.
Seems this has already been answered, but it should be noted that there are countries where this is illegal, even at a place of work.
For instance, in Switzerland it is illegal to track which websites each user has been visiting.
Other than specific laws to the contrary, I would agree that it is acceptable to do, since there should be no reasonable expectation of privacy at the workplace. That said, informing the users is the right thing to do.
One other caveat, if the data you are collecting is sensitive enough that an attacker would have use of it (say, the screenshots include CC numbers), then you must ensure that this information is well protected. (I'm not referring to the user's information, but say the bank's clients' account details.)
If it is done without the user's consent, then it is definitely a breach of privacy. Even with the user's consent, it must be made clear exactly what information is being passed back. If the screenshot was to grab the whole screen, not just a window, then you could potentially get all kinds of private info.
Is this an internal app or a something for the public? If it's internal, it's not unethical, even if it's scummy, to monitor users.
If it's something for the public, in order to not be sleazy:
the user has to be able to opt-out
no personally identifying data can be collected
only data about your app (not screenshots of the entire screen) can be collected
It really depends on exactly what is being collected, the disclosure, and if the program could be opted out of. If that passes the smell test, then ensuring the reporting does not provide an attack vector and the data is appropriately safeguarded becomes your concern. If things seem shady get some written 'feature request' to CYA. The basic idea, if done right, is nothing new. Microsoft, for instance, does it with some of their products.
In a work environment, I think it is OK as long as all employees know that they may be monitored. I've seen places (Intuit was one) where employees are tracked all day. Not my cup of tea, however.
In government facilities, there is typically some sort of login screen that states that anything and everything done on that machine is subject to monitoring.
If these are applications that are run by the general public, I'd say that it better be crystal clear that you are collecting data on them. Personally, I'd rather not have programs 'phoning home' with info about my activities, boring as they may be.
If the client is external, this should be disclosed to the client. Actually, if the client is internal OR external, if you do not disclose it, it is totally unethical.
An employment agreement that states that there can be no expectation of privacy constitutes disclosure.
Screenshots? If it's not opt-in, I'd
say that's a pretty clear breach of
privacy.
you've opted-in by cashing your paycheck :)
as many indicated, informing the user is the best the company can do. Informing, not asking to Opt-In.
I would suggest reading:
Privacy. My interpretation is that people will expect some things to be kept private such as their personal information. By interacting with your sites, users are sharing information with you that you should be able to use but not distribute or abuse as if it was your own.
Screen shots is obviously the hot button issue here. While users entering information into a text input field are knowingly giving you information, screen shots go beyond what a typical user would expect and therefore should be disclosed to the user through a privacy policy.
Collecting anonymous usage should be doable without screenshots.
If your app collects any data that is meant to be protected by privacy laws, then you will have to treat the screenshots as containing sensitive information and protect them accordingly. Data protection laws are pretty strict in most countries.
Unless you have a really really small company, privacy laws vary a lot between countries, and the feature is probably more trouble than it's worth. In any country I've even lived in, that idea would never fly.
But don't ask a bunch of hacks on a site like stack overflow. Seriously, ask a lawyer.
I think the question is still a bit vague as to who is going to be monitored for what. From what I understand who'll be monitored are the end users who are using the application and the gathered data will be used internally. Assuming this is the case, I think, I can contribute the following answer:
If you are going to monitor end users to see how they are using your product, you are in human factors/user experience business and what you want to do is really an experiment. Doing such an experiment requires consent of the subject (the end user). In an academic setting (and I think the same goes for industry as well), there is an Institutional Review Board (IRB) which grants permission for such experiments. I believe in the industry scene there are similar organizations (just not sure what they are called). A request for permission for such an experiment is accompanied by a report which details the user experiment in a very specific manner. The IRB than decides whether to issue a permit or not.
The important point is the consent here and users should know about the experiment and agree to be subjects. I think, in the absence of a user consent the experiment is neither ethical nor legal. Again, I approached this based on an assumption and tried to summarize my experience in such experiments.
Collecting screen shots may be illegal even if employees are notified. This is an issue of local law and federal law. You haven't said which country you are in. In California, for example, monitoring screens might violate both workplace privacy laws and wiretap laws. You should get an opinion of your corporate attorney before implementing this.
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What's the best way to close the loop and have a desktop app "call home" with customer feedback? Right now our code will login to our SMTP server and send me some email.
The site GetSatisfaction has been an increasingly popular way to get customer feedback.
http://getsatisfaction.com/
GetSatisfaction is a community based site that builds a community around your application. Users can post questions, comments, and feedback about and application and get answers to their questions either from other members or from members of the development team themselves.
They also have an API so you can incorporate GetSatifaction into your app, and/or your site.
I've been playing with it for a couple of weeks and it is pretty cool. Kind of like stackoverflow, but for customer feedback.
Feedback from users and programmers simply is one of the most important points of development in my opinion. The whole web2.0 - beta - concept more or less is build around this concept and therefore there should be absolutely no pain involved whatsoever for the user. What does it have to do with your question? I think quite a bit. If you provide a feedback option, make it visible in your application, but don't annoy the user (like MS sometimes does with there feedback thingy on there website above all elements!!). Place it somewhere directly! visible, but discreet. What about a separate menu entry? Some leftover space in the statusbar? Put it there so it is accessible all the time. Why? People really liking your product or who are REALLY annoyed about something will probably find your feedback option in any case, but you will miss the small things. Imagine a user unsure about the value of his input "should I really write him?". This one will probably will not make the afford in searching and in the end these small things make a really outstanding product, don't they? OK, the user found your feedback form, but how should it look and what's next? Keep it simple and don't ask him dozens questions and provoke him with check- and radioboxes. Give him two input fields, one for a title and one for a long description. Not more and not less. Maybe a small text shortly giving him some info what might be useful (OS, program version etc., maybe his email), but leave all this up to him. How to get the message to you and how to show the user that his input counts? In most cases this is simple. Like levand suggested use http and post the comment on a private area on your site and provide a link to his input. After revisiting his input, make it public and accessible for all (if possible). There he can see your response and that you really care etc.. Why not use the mail approach? What about a firewall preventing him to access your site? Duo to spam in quite some modern routers these ports are by default closed and you certainly will not get any response from workers in bigger companies, however port 80 or 443 is often open... (maybe you should check, if the current browser have a proxy installed and use this one..). Although I haven't used GetSatisfaction yet, I somewhat disagree with Nick Hadded, because you don't want third parties to have access to possible private and confidential data. Additionally you want "one face to the customer" and don't want to open up your customers base to someone else. There is SOO much more to tell, but I don't want to get banned for tattling .. haha! THX for caring about the user! :)
You might be interested in UseResponse, open-source (yet not free) hosted customer feedback / idea gathering solution that will be released in December, 2001.
It should run on majority of PHP hosting environments (including shared ones) and according to it's authors it's absorbed only the best features of it's competitors (mentioned in other answers) while will have little-to-none flaws of these.
You could also have the application send a POST http request directly to a URL on your server.
What my friend we are forgetting here is that, does having a mere form on your website enough to convince the users how much effort a Company puts in to act on that precious feedback.
A users' note to a company is a true image about the product or service that they offer. In Web 2.0 culture, people feel proud of being part of continuous development strategy always preached by almost all companies nowadays.
A community engagement platform is the need of the hour & an entry point on ur website that gains enuf traction from visitors to start talking what they feel will leave no stone unturned in getting those precious feedback. Thats where products like GetSatisfaction, UserRules or Zendesk comes in.
A company's active community that involves unimagined ideas, unresolved issues and ofcourse testimonials conveys the better development strategy of the product or service they offer.
Personally, I would also POST the information. However, I would send it to a PHP script that would then insert it into a mySQL database. This way, your data can be pre-sorted and pre-categorized for analysis later. It also gives you the potential to track multiple entries by single users.
There's quite a few options. This site makes the following suggestions
http://www.suggestionbox.com/
http://www.kampyle.com/
http://getsatisfaction.com/
http://www.feedbackify.com/
http://uservoice.com/
http://userecho.com/
http://www.opinionlab.com/content/
http://ideascale.com/
http://sparkbin.net/
http://www.gri.pe/
http://www.dialogcentral.com/
http://websitechat.net/en/
http://www.anymeeting.com/
http://www.facebook.com/
I would recommend just using pre built systems. Saves you the hassle.
Get an Insight is good: http://getaninsight.com/
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Closed 10 years ago.
This question talks about different payment processors and what they cost, but I'm looking for the answer to what do I need to do if I want to accept credit card payments?
Assume I need to store credit card numbers for customers, so that the obvious solution of relying on the credit card processor to do the heavy lifting is not available.
PCI Data Security, which is apparently the standard for storing credit card info, has a bunch of general requirements, but how does one implement them?
And what about the vendors, like Visa, who have their own best practices?
Do I need to have keyfob access to the machine? What about physically protecting it from hackers in the building? Or even what if someone got their hands on the backup files with the sql server data files on it?
What about backups? Are there other physical copies of that data around?
Tip: If you get a merchant account, you should negotiate that they charge you "interchange-plus" instead of tiered pricing. With tiered pricing, they will charge you different rates based on what type of Visa/MC is used -- ie. they charge you more for cards with big rewards attached to them. Interchange plus billing means you only pay the processor what Visa/MC charges them, plus a flat fee. (Amex and Discover charge their own rates directly to merchants, so this doesn't apply to those cards. You'll find Amex rates to be in the 3% range and Discover could be as low as 1%. Visa/MC is in the 2% range). This service is supposed to do the negotiation for you (I haven't used it, this is not an ad, and I'm not affiliated with the website, but this service is greatly needed.)
This blog post gives a complete rundown of handling credit cards (specifically for the UK).
Perhaps I phrased the question wrong, but I'm looking for tips like these:
Use SecurID or eToken to add an additional password layer to the physical box.
Make sure the box is in a room with a physical lock or keycode combination.
I went through this process not to long ago with a company I worked for and I plan on going through it again soon with my own business. If you have some network technical knowledge, it really isn't that bad. Otherwise you will be better off using Paypal or another type of service.
The process starts by getting a merchant account setup and tied to your bank account. You may want to check with your bank, because a lot of major banks provide merchant services. You may be able to get deals, because you are already a customer of theirs, but if not, then you can shop around. If you plan on accepting Discover or American Express, those will be separate, because they provide the merchant services for their cards, no getting around this. There are other special cases also. This is an application process, be prepared.
Next you will want to purchase an SSL certificate that you can use for securing your communications for when the credit card info is transmitted over public networks. There are plenty of vendors, but my rule of thumb is to pick one that is a brand name in a way. The better they are known, the better your customer has probably heard of them.
Next you will want to find a payment gateway to use with your site. Although this can be optional depending on how big you are, but majority of the time it won't be. You will need one. The payment gateway vendors provide a way to talk to the Internet Gateway API that you will communicate with. Most vendors provide HTTP or TCP/IP communication with their API. They will process the credit card information on your behalf. Two vendors are Authorize.Net and PayFlow Pro. The link I provide below has some more information on other vendors.
Now what? For starters there are guidelines on what your application has to adhere to for transmitting the transactions. During the process of getting everything setup, someone will look at your site or application and make sure you are adhering to the guidelines, like using SSL and that you have terms of use and policy documentation on what the information the user is giving you is used for. Don't steal this from another site. Come up with your own, hire a lawyer if you need to. Most of these things fall under the PCI Data Security link Michael provided in his question.
If you plan on storing the credit card numbers, then you better be prepared to put some security measures in place internally to protect the info. Make sure the server the information is stored on is only accessible to members who need to have access. Like any good security, you do things in layers. The more layers you put in place the better. If you want you can use key fob type security, like SecureID or eToken to protect the room the server is in. If you can't afford the key fob route, then use the two key method. Allow a person who has access to the room to sign out a key, which goes along with a key they already carry. They will need both keys to access the room. Next you protect the communication to the server with policies. My policy is that the only thing communicating to it over the network is the application and that information is encrypted. The server should not be accessible in any other form. For backups, I use truecrypt to encrypt the volumes the backups will be saved to. Anytime the data is removed or stored somewhere else, then again you use truecrypt to encrypt the volume the data is on. Basically where ever the data is, it needs to be encrypted. Make sure all processes for getting at the data carries auditing trails. use logs for access to the server room, use cameras if you can, etc... Another measure is to encrypt the credit card information in the database. This makes sure that the data can only be viewed in your application where you can enforce who sees the information.
I use pfsense for my firewall. I run it off a compact flash card and have two servers setup. One is for fail over for redundancy.
I found this blog post by Rick Strahl which helped tremendously to understand doing e-commerce and what it takes to accept credit cards through a web application.
Well, this turned out to be a long answer. I hope these tips help.
Ask yourself the following question: why do you want to store credit card numbers in the first place? Chances are that you don't. In fact, if you do store them and manage to have one stolen, you could be looking at some serious liability.
I've written an app that does store credit card numbers (since the transactions were processed offline). Here's a good way to do it:
Get an SSL certificate!
Create a form to get CC# from the user.
Encrypt part (not all!) of the CC# and store it in your database. (I'd suggest the middle 8 digits.) Use a strong encryption method and a secret key.
Mail the remainder of the CC# to whoever processes your transactions (probably yourself) with the ID of the person to process.
When you log in later, you will type in the ID and the mailed-out portion of the CC#. Your system can decrypt the other portion and recombine to get the full number so you can process the transaction.
Finally, delete the online record. My paranoid solution was to overwrite the record with random data before deletion, to remove the possibility of an undelete.
This sounds like a lot of work, but by never recording a complete CC# anywhere, you make it extremely hard for a hacker to find anything of value on your webserver. Trust me, it's worth the peace of mind.
The PCI 1.2 document just came out. It gives a process for how to implement PCI compliance along with the requirements. You can find the full doc here:
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml
Long story short, create a separate network segment for whichever servers will be dedicated to storing CC info (usually DB server(s)). Isolate the data as much as possible, and ensure only the minimum access necessary to access the data is present. Encrypt it when you store it. Never store PAN's. Purge old data and rotate your encryption keys.
Example Don'ts :
Don't let the same account that can lookup general info in the database look up CC info.
Don't keep your CC database on the same physical server as your web server.
Don't allow external (Internet) traffic into your CC database network segment.
Example Dos:
Use a separate Database account to query CC info.
Disallow all but required traffic to CC database server via firewall/access-lists
Restrict access to CC server to a limited set of authorized users.
I'd like to add a non-technical comment that you may wish to think about
Several of my clients run e-commerce sites, including a couple who have moderately large stores. Both of those, whilst they certainly could implement a payment gateway choose not too, they take the cc number, store it temporarily encrypted online and process it manually.
They do this because of the high incidence of fraud and manual processing allows them to take additional checks before filling an order. I'm told that they reject a little over 20% of all their transactions - processing manually certainly takes extra time and in one case they have an employee who does nothing but process transactions, but the cost of paying his salary is apparently less than their exposure if they just passed cc numbers though an online gateway.
Both of these clients are delivering physical goods with resale value, so are particularly exposed and for items like software where a fraudulent sale wouldn't result in any actual loss your mileage would vary, but it's worth considering above the technical aspects of an online gateway if implementing such is really what you want.
EDIT: And since creating this answer I'd like to add a cautionary tale and say that the time is past when this was a good idea.
Why? Because I know of another contact who was taking a similar approach. The card details were stored encrypted, the website was accessed by SSL, and the numbers were deleted immediately after processing. Secure you think?
No - one machine on their network got infected by a key logging Trojan. As a result they were identified as being the source for several score credit card forgeries - and were consequently hit by a large fine.
As a result of this I now never advise anyone to handle credit cards themselves. Payment gateways have since become much more competitive and cost effective, and fraud measures have improved. The risk is now no longer worth it.
I could delete this answer, but I think best to leave up edited as a cautionary tale.
Keep in mind that using SSL to send a card number from a browser to a server is like covering your credit card number with your thumb when you hand your card to a cashier in a restaurant: your thumb (SSL) prevents other customers in the restaurant (the Net) from seeing the card, but once the card is in the hands of the cashier (a web server) the card is no longer protected by the SSL exchange, and the cashier could be doing anything with that card. Access to a saved card number can only be stopped by the security on the web server. Ie, most card thefts on the net aren't done during transmission, they're done by breaking through poor server security and stealing databases.
Why bother with PCI compliance?? At best you'll shave a fraction of a percent off your processing fees. This is one of those cases where you gotta be sure this is what you want to be doing with your time both upfront in development and over time in keeping up with the latest requirements.
In our case, it made the most sense to use a subscription-savy gateway and pair that with a merchant account. The subscription-savy gateway allows you to skip all the PCI compliance and do nothing more than process the transaction proper.
We use TrustCommerce as our gateway and are happy with their service/pricing. They have code for a bunch of languages that makes integration pretty easy.
Be sure to get a handle on the extra work and budget required for PCI. PCI may require huge external audit fees and internal effort/support. Also be aware of the fines/penalties that can be unilaterally levied on you, often hugely disproportionate to the scale of the 'ofense'.
There's a lot to the whole process. The single easiest way to do it is to use services similar to paypal, so that you never actually handle any credit card data. Apart from that, there's a quite a bit of stuff to go through to get approved to offer credit card services on your website. You should probably talk with your bank, and the people who issue your merchant ID to help you in setting up the process.
As others have mentioned the easiest way into this area is with the use of Paypal, Google checkout or Nochex. However if you intend to to a significant amount of business you may wish to look up "upgrading" to higher level site integrations services such as WorldPay, NetBanx (UK) or Neteller (US). All of these services are reasonably easy to set up. And I know that Netbanx offers convenient integration into some of the off the shelf shopping cart solutions such as Intershop (because I wrote some of them). Beyond that you are looking at direct integration with the banking systems (and their APAX systems) but thats hard and at that point you also need to prove to the Credit card companies that you are handling the credit card numbers securely (probably not worth considering if you are not taking $100k's worth per month).
Working from 1st to last the cost/benefits are that the early options are much easier (quicker/cheaper) to set up put you pay quite high handling charges for each transaction. the later ones are much more costly to set up but you pay less in the long run.
The other advantage of the most of the non dedicated solutions is that you don't need to keep encrypted credit card numbers secure. Thats someone else's problem :-)
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Closed 11 years ago.
Should be available to non-U.S. companies, easy to setup, reliable, cheap, customizable, etc. What are your experiences?
You can't really answer this kind of question with a "I like 'insert provide name here'" type answer because like so many things it is a balance and the reasons for choosing a payment processing solution tend to be complex.
Volume / Value
The most important factor in choosing a secure payment clearance service (the people who will connect to the banking networks and clear the money for you - will refer to them as SPCS) is how many widgets will you be selling at what cost. The pricing models of all the SCPS providers is based around this equation. This dictates the economics of using the service, which is nearly always the most important factor.
For example, in the UK securetrading.net have a large annual fee and high minimum transaction values (been a while since I've seen the exact numbers and they don't make it immediately obvious on the site, but this is for illustration only anyway) making it one of the most expensive solutions to use if you are selling high value low volume. Most smaller clients will fall into this model. High value is really anything over a couple of dollars. Low volume is typically anything less than tens of thousands of units per month. However, if you are running a donations service in the aftermath of an international environmental disaster (relatively low value very high volume) then they become one of the cheapest.
Factor in to this the setup costs (relatively high), and the cost to tie the service into the site (in SecureTrading's case it's very easy to do, but still a lot harder than adding a PayPal button) and you start to build up a true picture.
On the flip side, a service such as PayPal has very low setup costs (no fee to pay, and trivially easy to integrate), but relatively high transaction costs. It is great for high value / low volume transactions.
The Bank
There are two main categories of payment clearance service - Bureau and Bank Acquired.
In the UK at least NetBanx, SecureTrading and WorldPay offer both bank acquired and bureau services. ProtX and SecPay offer only bank acquired services. PayPal and its ilk operates slightly outside both definitions (see Protection below).
A Bank Acquired service plumbs into your normal banking merchant account and clears the funds straight into it. As well as charging you for this service, your bank will also take a slice, typically this is more than the SPCS provider will charge and so it actually is the bank that becomes the deciding factor.
Some banks will only work with their preferred provider. In the UK, most banks want you to have a separate Internet Merchant Account even if you already have a Merchant Account with them.
I always tell clients to shop around, as this will make a huge difference to how much their e-commerce venture can bring in. All banks are not created equal.
Bureau services effectively act as your bank at the same time as providing the clearance service. They were popular in a time when banks hadn't grasped the concept of the Internet and would prefer transactions be chiseled into stone tablets if they got their way. Often the choice between a bureau service and a bank acquired service is made for you based on circumstances.
Trading History
In many countries (including the UK), most banks won't give you a merchant account until you have been trading for a particular period of time (2 years in the UK). Your only option is then a bureau service.
Cash flow
Most bureau services will hold onto your cash as security against "charge backs".
If you sell me a Ferrari and I am horrified to learn that you've sold me a small metal toy rather than the 1.5 tonnes of Italian automotive passion I was expecting, I will complain to my credit card company who will refund me and then chase your merchant services provider for a refund. They will have to give them the refund and then chase you for the money.
It's therefore in their interests to hold on to your money for a period of 4-6 weeks to protect against this. If you sell services or goods with no capital outlay (software for instance), then you can afford this. If on the other hand, you really are having to pay your luxury car importer to provide you with stock, then cash flow becomes very important and you're going to need a bank acquired service where you can be paid immediately.
Protection
One major downside to PayPal and similar services is that it is not covered under the same regulations that govern credit cards.
Simply put, if you buy something on a credit card your card provider is liable for ensure you get what you paid for (broadly speaking, in most countries, does not constitute legal advice etc.) and if you have a problem with your purchase they will refund you very quickly and then will go and chase the person that you paid.
This is the kind of protection you hear about when Leo Laporte advertises American Express on his podcasts. It is a "Good Thing"TM. You don't have that protection with PayPal because when you use your credit card on PayPal, you are actually buying PayPal's service. So, even if you are mis-sold a product, the person you paid for the service (PayPal) didn't mis-sell, they provided the service you paid for. This breaks the chain.
PayPal don't have a legal obligation to protect you in the same way, and their record on refunding ripped off customers is less than spangly. I'm guessing they have "Caveat Emptor" writ large on the walls of their head office. :)
I'm not dissing PayPal, they are way ahead of the curve on many other security features, but just another factor to bear in mind.
End to end integration
Different services differ in their ease of integration. Oh boy do they differ. I'm sitting on some work right now to do an HSBC integration. I'd rather have a root canal. Some of the systems make big assumptions about the way you have to work with them, and are poorly designed or inflexible. Retro-fitting them to an active site can be very painful. Some of them are beautiful and easy to work with (and not necessarily less secure). The biggest difference is how you choose to integrate though.
Most services integrate by allowing you to redirect to a secure site where your customer fills in his / her details. They are finally redirected back to a page on your own site with the results of the transaction. This works well in most cases and is easiest to integrate.
When you buy something on Amazon, you don't get redirected to WorldPay, or PayPal however. If you want end-to-end integration, most services now will let the communication happen behind the scenes. Your own site has to have a decent secure server certificate of course, and the integration is necessarily more complex.
Reputation
It used to be that PayPal was used on dinky sites. You wouldn't catch Amazon using it. That perception has changed a lot, and in fact in some senses PayPal does security better than most. If your audience expects to see PayPal and you give them some other service then you may lose custom, or vice versa. These days many merchants offer a choice to customers.
UK Providers
WorldPay. Well established. Bureau and bank acquired. Relatively high transaction costs and annual costs. Fairly easy to integrate. Owned ultimately by Royal Bank of Scotland.
SecPay. Bank Acquired. Low per transaction cost and low annual cost and flexible payment models.
ProtX. Bank Acquired. Low per transaction cost and low annual cost, flexible payment models. Can be quite demanding to integrate.
HSBC. Bank Acquired. Low per transaction cost. High set up and annual costs. Very inflexible to integrate.
SecureTrading. Bureau and Bank Acquired. Low per transaction cost but high setup and annual costs. Was a doddle to integrate last time I used it (9 years ago!)
NetBanx. Bureau and Bank Acquired. Haven't used since 1996 so can't comment!
And of course PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon FPS are well worth looking at and worth a whole answer on their own!
Summary
Told you it wasn't that simple! Usually, as developers, we're not in the position to choose for ourselves, and these decisions should be driven by the business needs of our employer / client.
Most e-commerce projects would start with PayPal or similar. When the business gets enough orders that they could save money by switching to another service, then they've got enough money to pay for the switch.
Disclaimer: I am UK based, and have performed many integrations with a whole slew of these services over the years, however the market changes all the time and things may have changed and your mileage may vary! I am not a lawyer or accountant, and if you take my advice it's not my fault :)
I'd say paypal or GoogleCheckout.
Google Checkout is either 2% + .20USD or free depending on how much you spend on adwords. If you spend a dollar on adWords, your next $10 on Google checkout is free.
Paypal is 1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 USD (2.9% for up to $30,000/month, 1.9% for more than $100,000/month)
Without factoring in the 20/30 cents, Paypal is just barely cheaper if you sell more than $100,000 per month, and spend nothing on adwords.
http://www.authorize.net/ works well. This type of solution would allow your customer to enter his/her credit card directly.
I've been researching Google Checkout. If you require subscriptions (recurring payments) like I do - Google Checkout has it but it is still in beta. So depending on when you want to go live and your needs - you may want to use something else.
esellerate
if it is Digital stuff that you are selling, I recommend http://www.esellerate.net/ .
they have nice support for website payment, delivery of serial numbers upon sell and even have API so you can integrate the buying process into your application in case it is a desktop application.
Well by cheap do you mean processing fees or month fees? Also is this for micro or normal transactions? PayPal in my experience is an all around good choice because it offers both starter to professional level payment processing services that fit most needs.
I've looked at WorldPay and SecPay in the past; you need to know your onions to use them competently, I think - if you want really nice integration, at any rate.
Google Check-out isn't available to non-US companies. I didn't realize this until the last stages of my research, so I found it quite annoying (considering it was very easy to work with and very well documented).
Unfortunately in order to make things as convenient as possible for your end users, you're pretty much stuck with having to support Paypal. No one else comes close in terms of registered users.
I've used CyberSource in the past, and had a good experience.
They support several interfaces including SOAP, work internationally and have a pretty good web interface.
I'm not sure whether it's cheap though.
http://www.cybersource.com/products_and_services/global_payment_services/credit_card_processing/
Epoch is pretty large and available in US and EU:
http://www.epoch.com/en/index.html
I have no idea about their conditions though.
I'd have to go with paypal. I've used it in the past, and its really quite painless. All you need to do is create an account, and it's automatically available to you.
Try AlertPay, they have very competetive fees.
alertpay looks great low fees (compared with paypal), supports more countries , developers center