I'm a litle skeptical of how "cheap" this really is. The home page says
$.08 per transaction
over 500, but I can't find where they define charges for less than 500
transactions. Most
banks charge a monthly fee plus a percentage of each transaction. For a
small volume of
sales this most likely will be in the neighborhood of 3%. I use Verisign
througn Wells Fargo, and
pay $25 per month plus 2.5% of each transaction. They told me I would have
to have
over 50K transactions per year to get below that. Maybe geotrust is getting
volume discounts
by agregating merchants, and passing that along to customers. But I would
read their terms
and conditions carefully before signing up. Banks (and those who act like
banks) tend to
have fairly harsh and restrictive contracts with lots of fine print.
As for the mechanics of setting up online payment, this is generally
pretty easy once you
have the documentation describing the interfaces to the payment processor.
I've done it both
ways, using a menu-driven shopping cart system, and rolling my own custom
PHP script.
Personally I prefer the custom route because you have a lot more flexibility
in presentation.
With Verisign Payflow Link or Payflow Pro, it can be as simple as a single
HTML form.
--Phil M.
> I can't vouch for this company but I've been doing research lately to
figure out
> that very thing.
>
> As far as expensive, this is the cheapest option I've found so far:
> http://www.geotrust.com/web_security/quickpay.htm
>
>