>Hi Rick,
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>I am sure you know way more about all this than I do.
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>The only thing I am saying is in my personal experience in setting up Authorize.net, the issue wasn't really with Authorize.net but rather with the merchant bank that you must also use.
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>With PayPal, all this was a non-issue, and setting up of the account was instant. So, it is at least a workable alternative, and to 'smaller companies' might be all they require.
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>Also, thanks for the link you gave on PayPal.

Yeah, I've been dealing with merchant providers for over 10 years now and I can tell you that things have gotten a lot easier. I signed up with MerchantPlus and was up and running the next day, so signup is pretty damn straight forward.

PayPal has none of that, but as I said for a commercial site PayPal isn't a fully accepted form of payment and considered something used by small time vendors.

I don't really prefer one or the other - I like it any way customers pay me <bg>... as far as I'm concerned I want to make it as easy as possible for people to give me their money for our products.

Regards,

+++ Rick ---



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>Mel Cummings
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>
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>>While I think PayPal is an excellent alternative means, for the merchant (and also for the customer) PayPal as the primary choice is not a good one. Managing PayPal accounts is a lot more involved than dealing with typical merchant providers. The process of payment through PayPal also is not very clean for a Web site. While you can do this (actually wrote this up here), it's still messy and looks very unprofessional IMHO.
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>That said I think it's a good idea to provide this option for those that don't want to pay by credit card. Providing both is probably the best way to present this. Having done that on my Web Site I can tell you though that only a tiny fraction of people - especially businesses - will use PayPal to make payments. Out of the orders that come into the West Wind site I'd say less than 1% go through PayPal...<