Merchant Accounts

[Matthew]

Who uses their own merchant account here or do you use 3rd party payment gateways such as PayPal, NoChex and 2CO etc...

For those with a merchant account.. who is it with, costs, fee's and do you get features like fraud protection etc...

 

[monaghan]

Most of my customers pay by standing order or other bank transfer. NoChex and PayPal are the most popular of the others, some pay by cheque (but they're mainly the local ones). I've been considering getting the Nochex merchant as this looks a nice half way house to a full merchant account.

 

[Matthew]

I used NoChex in the past but I seem to remember limits to what you could withdraw each day. Will is a programmer at NoChex and I think he said they "might" have been working on that. Maybe he could chip in and give us some inside info (if he is allowed )

 

[Will]

The withdraw limits are pretty high on the Merchant Account. The general rule of thumb here in the office is if the applicant is over £1,000 a month then it could be worth giving them a Nochex merchant account. I wouldn't apply if you are not planning to transact this much (or are not planning to transact through Nochex with this much.)

The fraud protection shifts a little. With a standard seller account at Nochex you are completely covered from chargebacks (as long as it wasn't anything you did! EG: running stolen cards through your account. etc.) With a merchant account the chargebacks from non-account holders (ie: people who just use a card to pay without logging in.) can be passed on to you. Something that is not mentioned on the Nochex pages is that there is usually a retained balance. This is a balance that Nochex say you must keep in your account to cover any chargebacks. Let's say they set your retained balance to £500 - you will not be able to withdraw that £500 until you close your account.

Merchant sellers can also accept payments from overseas (only in GBP at the moment, though)

As Matthew says - I'm a developer at Nochex. I have handed my notice in, however, and will be leaving on the 28th June. Maybe after this date I can divulge much more information.

 

[Matthew]

Nice information there and I am tempted to dig up my old account and see if it's still active. I think I only passed through a few hundred ££ or maybe 1000 ish in the time I used it.

Where are you moving next Will?

 

[Will]

Last week I ran a procedure that dormatised any accounts not used in 2 years. Your account is probably dormant. I will talk more on this in 4 weeks time.

I am still deciding between;

* Job near huddersfield with a great bunch of lads who don't take anything seriously. No formal clothes (jeans + T-shirt if you like) Job title: Senior web developer. Not sure about the technical ability of other staff, though. No pension contributions, 25 days holiday. 40 mins drive from home.

* Job in Wakefield for an advertising firm, very professional, laptop provided. Job title: Developer. 25 days holiday, full pension contributions up to 5% of my wage. Seems to be high technical ability. 30 mins drive from home. Likely to offer £1000 less a year than the other job has already offered.