Hi Joshua,

No offense, but at 5 cent per transaction it will take a long time to recoup a $495 library charge...

If you access Payment Tech or whoever directly they too will charge you a processing charge, so I think that this is hardly an issue. In any case a 0.05 charge is not going to be an issue unless you process really small charges. Ultimately you most merchants end up paying a flat fee (around $20 a month) for hte gateway access, which if you are running any sort of serious business is a trivial amount.

And BTW, as far as I know both PayFlow and Authorize.NET are providing their own processing for Visa/Mastercard. AMEX of course ALWAYS goes to an external processing network anyway, so this is really a moot point too.

I understand that a company selling these services must charge for the service in some way but in light of the ability to directly connect to the gateway services these days it makes little sense to pay for a third party solution and pay a high premium for it.

I have no vested interest in any of the providers, but whenever I see third party solutions it really makes me wonder where hte value proposition is... Ultimately the key is how easy is it to integrate the actual processing into our own or shrink wrap solutions and hte best way to do this is to have a direct interface to the provider that's simple to implement (a la Authorize.NET and AccessPoitn which use plain HTTP POST operations) for you as the developer or as a reseller of e-commerce like services.

I've gone through about a dozen of CC processors and the processes involved and by far the easiest way to get it done IMHO is through providers that have a clear understanding of the Developer side of things and cater to that segment.

Just my 2 cents worth...

+++ Rick ---


>Rick,
>
>These IP gateway providers like Authorize.NET or PayFlow Pro impose additional per transaction charges on the top of the charges of the credit processors. Today many processors establish their own IP gateways so users can avoid intemediate "gateways". We provide products that can interface directly to Paymentech, Vital, Lynk Systems, and others. We have seen transaction speeds under one seconds with the broad band connection.
>
>Joshua Zavelovich
>Medasyst, Inc.
>www.medasyst-software.com