For instance, if you're expecting a higher-than-normal sales volume (e.g. a launch day, version upgrade, promotion), it doesn't hurt to give their Merchant Services department a phone call (the number I was given was 866-837-1851).

Be sure you ask for Merchant Services if you're not connected to them by default—it's a whole other support organization from what I could gather on my last phone call with them a month or so ago.

They may be taken aback by the reason for your call, but you can go over your phone numbers and addresses with them to make sure they can get a hold of you in the event that a fraud trigger is hit. If they can't speak with you, they have no other choice but to shut you down until you call them.

You can also get them to put a note on your account about the expected volume increase, so that when the activity does go into review, it may not be such a harsh reaction (e.g. freezing withdrawals temporarily rather than totally shutting down incoming funds.)

For the price of their service, the wide range of things you can do with their APIs, and the support I've received thus far, there's not a whole lot left to complain about IMO. Maybe my tune will change if I experience some of the "trouble" you hear about online, but I think that the proactive approach I describe above may help prevent that from ever happening.

Yes, Paypal do sometimes have problems, but if you follow their rules and regulations and don't build your business around them you should be okay. The majority of horror stories are knee jerk reactions to an unfortunate situation which are never reported on again when a resolution is found.

The reason Paypal have such over zealous fraud checking and don't hesitate to lock accounts until they're 100% sure it's legit is because of how large of a target they are for fraud and also because of how accountable they will be. If someone sends me $10 and I run off with it, Paypal will have to pay out that $10 from their own pocket to the customer, might be okay on a small scale but at Paypals volume...

Personally I think the best method is to have a basic merchant account (authorize, nochex etc) and also Paypal, use your merchant account as the default credit card processor and also offer Paypal for those who either have Paypal accounts or are only comfortable with Paypal. If you're smart about how you use Paypal you'll be fine :)

And I would bet they have never paid a dollar out of their own pocket to cover fraud, they basically will close the accounts of both parties to cover themselves or take "fees" out of the covered party's return for their "protection service".

Never, ever, keep more than $100 in your PayPal account. You are begging for trouble otherwise. Also if possible close the original checking account that you tied to your PayPal account, because they will tap into it to reverse any transaction at their will, without notice.

1) Use your full legal name when creating the account.

2) If you're creating the account for a company, make sure the owner of the account is an officer of the company (CEO, Vice President, etc).

3) Have only one account. If you're creating an account for your business, and you already have a personal account, you're gonna run into problems.

4) Make sure the mailing address you give is actually accessible. PayPal's gonna mail a verification code to you once you start making a sizable amount.

And just in general, once you start getting money into your account, PayPal's always gonna come knocking. At one point, PayPal prevented us from even receiving payments. But eventually, after a while of working with them, they got off our backs and we stopped having problems with them.

-PayPal: They are popular. You "must" support them because a huge % of your users will consider them as the only electronic payment system in the web.

-Credit Cards: Because they are even more popular and available in almost every citizen's pocket (we are speaking here of developed countries).

-Moneybookers: They are an alternative to PayPal. Don't underestimate its' power. It may take only 5% of user's share usage, but can be a valuable alternative if PayPal is down.

Have you considered such systems like fastspring? They offer a multiple gateway solution and they take a % for that.

I am looking into this myself (but only doing business in The Netherlands) and this seems to be one of the best solutions. For my purposes anyway.

For Dutch businesses: Ogone supports iDEAL and I think their transaction overhead is actually lower than when you do business with iDEAL directly.

Also, any chance you could elaborate on, or perhaps email me tav@espians.com on the general pricing?

As to pricing, it depends on your transaction volume. The only link I can find is in Dutch but it's relatively straight-forward (and maybe Google Translate can help you out).

http://www.internetkassa.com/ogone-abonnementen/

Paul, our programmer who handles our payment gateway stuff, wrote a Python interface to the iDEAL API by Mollie.nl for use in Django projects. We also have our own transaction system, as we are dealing with donations, not your normal purchases. So we ended up rolling our own.

http://github.com/peeb/django-mollie-ideal

We're based in the UK and use Worldpay and Protx (as well a PayPal and Google Checkout)

http://spreedly.com/

One thing that is pretty cool is they let you be merchant account agnostic (all CC's are stored in their own PCI compliant vault). So if Authorize.net drops you or is being stupid, you can setup a different merchant account and the entire thing is transparent from your customer's perspective.

Peer to Peer payment processing system $.25 per transaction

I can't use google checkout (not present here), and I want to avoid resorting to Paypal because of horror stories(actually one of my clients got permanently suspended). Any other solutions anyone could recommend to me?

About other countries and currencies: http://support.chargify.com/faqs/general-questions/does-char...

First, they require a ton of documentation to become a registered business with them. Their API is non-existent, and getting answers is difficult because you either need to speak Chinese or use Google Translate. A lot.

While I'm sure it's great, it can be very frustrating.

Easy to configure, neat interface, great support. And accepts paypal payments.

If you want 100% control over your money, you could use http://paybox.com, they are located in france but I believe their solutions work worldwide.

Few other are - payvision.

Global players - Google checkout, Amazon checkout.

As http://spreedly.com wants to support WireCard in the future, too this might be a very interesting alternative. too