[bitfolk] Payment service providers

Hello, Anyone got any experience integrating with a payment service provider basically from scratch? i.e. to take credit/debit card payments directly from the web site. Protx[1] looks good, but requires a merchant account and Bitfolk does not have one. Bitfolk's bank, Abbey, is not one of the ones listed and after having a look through the sites of the ones that are, getting an account seems costly and painful. Worldpay[2] seems to offer to do the lot end to end, but for a high fee. From what I can see they want 4.5% + £0.06 per transaction. The average[3] transaction Bitfolk makes is £27.04, the mode[4] is £8.00 and the median[5] is £16.00. Danger, ASCII art approaching.. +--------------------+--------------+--------------------------+ | Payment | Transaction | Cost to process | | method | fees +---------+-------+--------+ | | | Average | Mode | Median | +--------------------+--------------+---------+-------+--------+ | BACS | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 | £0.00 | | Paypal | 3.4% + £0.20 | £1.12 | £0.47 | £0.74 | | Google | 1.5% + £0.15 | £0.56 | £0.27 | £0.39 | | Worldpay | | | | | | (UK debit) | £0.56 | £0.56 | £0.56 | £0.56 | | (everything else) | 4.5% + £0.06 | £1.28 | £0.42 | £0.78 | +--------------------+--------------+---------+-------+--------+ Protx does not appear to have any transaction fees of its own for the Small Business plan, just £20/month flat fee. Operating a merchant account may have separate fees however. Most of the banks seem to be keen to push their own PSP services which look quite costly. I'm finding it hard to find information for just the basic merchant account such that Protx could be used. Worldpay also costs £30/month on top of the transaction fees. If there is no other easy option then I would probably implement Worldpay, but would have to pass the costs on. Likewise for anything else that ends up more costly than Paypal. So, anyone got any other recommendations? I'm not bothered if the solution needs to redirect the customer to the PSP's own web site as long as it actually is secure and has enough of an API to make a basic shopping cart site with it. Cheers, Andy [1] http://www.protx.com/packages_hiw_website.asp [2] http://www.worldpay.com/business/content.php?page=pricing2&c=UK [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB