I have been looking into take credit card as forms of payment. At the moment I use paypal so people can still pay with credit card buy have to have a paypal account. I was wondering what is a good approach to accepting credit cards. I there a script or program that I can use or should I use a credit card processing company?

You definitely need some type of merchant account as you can't process the cards without one. You would need some type of script to use with the gateway, unless you plan on processing all of the orders manually. You also should have an SSL cert for security since PayPal provides the encryption for you on their site.

Ok well I use modernbill for my accounting so I know that will work for the processing. Well time to find a merchant to process these orders. So you know of anyone with decent prices and good service for this?

Contact Wells Fargo, they have good prices.

You can get a merchant account at either of the following:

merchantplus.com

modernauthorize.net

Both are good places.

You may also want to look into Worldpay.com

If you have a good turnover than you should go with real Merchant account. If you are still not sure that you will have certain number of orders a month, than you should use a third party credit card proccessor like 2chekout.com.

Thay take $49 setup fee, $0.45 per Sale + 5.5% of Sale Amount. I believe that ModernBill is easy to integrate with 2checkout, anyway there is a god program, whoiscart, that costs around $30.

credit card processors (gateways) provides you with an API to use. you can use it with basically any programming language. if you're using billign software like modernbill, you can integrate it to several gateways without writing a single life of code. that's the modernbill advantage!

CDG Commerce has been good for us. Easy API for most billing software and GREAT customer support where real people answer the phones.

I agree with Grafiti ONLINE, merchant accounts need a good turnover, use 2checkout or any other 3rd part processor, you can also check out clientexec for billing your clients etc.

How about IKOBO.com they are also good

Looks interesting considering can have a debit card with them, has anyone here got experience with ikobo?

I can recommend CardService.

Good Luck
D.

I would highly recommend 2checkout.com to you. I have been using them for about 4 years now and love it. Their percentages are not crazy, their support is good and they actually do manually check for fraudulent orders, which I can't say about Paypal.

And as everyone else mentioned, you should get a real gateway if you have enough orders coming in.

I have to disagree. I would stay as far away from 2CheckOut as possible. While there support is decent, they almost always take at least 24 hours to determine if an order is fraudulent or not. This means that you could have already ordered a domain and activated a new client's account, just to have 2CheckOut turn around a day later a say the order is fraudulent and you will not be receiving the payment. This means you are out the $8 or so it cost you for the domain. You could just have orders stay in a pending state until you receive the fraud review, but many clients would not like that.

Since you are a ModernBill user, I recommend you go to http://www.modernauthorize.com and get the $49 setup fee BluePay merchant account. The setup fee is the same as 2CheckOut and the transaction fees are actually lower. You will also need to get an SSL certificate if you choose to get a real merchant account such as this.

I would recommend just getting the new paypal merchant processing account. Its tons easier and harder to commit fraud.