Paypal Alternative (No Commision)

They all take a commission. I guess you could have people send you checks in the mail but that wouldn't be very efficient.

If you have the business history, you can get a merchant account through your bank (or another financial institution). With a merchant account, you can take credit cards directly. However, you will need a decent shopping cart system or other paymentg processing software, and you WILL pay a comission to the bank for the account. There are other avenues for merchant accounts, and some have better rates than your local bank.

A typical merchant account charges a minimum monthly fee, and various charges for each transaction. One typical scenario is $0.25 per transaction plus a "discount rate" of around 2% of the total. This "discount rate" is called so because it is the amount the total is discounted by the bank before you get paid. If you use an online shopping cart or other online processor, there may be an additional $0.25 to 0.50 per transaction charged by the processor (which is separate from the bank that has your merchant account). With most accounts, the minimum monthly fee only gets charged if you don't pay the bank enough through the discount rate to cover the minimum thatg month. (if your discount rate is 2% and your minimum is $20, you need to have gross sales of $1000.00 before you cover the monthly minimum.

Discount rate can vary greatly depending on the bank and type of charge. Charges where you see the card and swipe it ("swiped transactions") typically have a lower discount rate than charges for "non-swiped transactions" such as online, phone in, or mailed in charge authorizations. High volume can get you a lower discount rate, but too many chargebacks and returns can result in higher discount rates.

One of the good things about a merchant account is that you get your money fairly quickly. 72 hours (3 business days) is a fairly standard response time from the time the card is charged and you get paid.

Bottom line is that whatever service you use for payment processing, you will pay some sort of commission, even if you have your own merchant account. With someone else, they take care of the paperwork, but charge you a higher amount to cover their processing and profit. For many people, paying PayPal or Clickbank to handle the processing is quite worth the money.

There is no payment system that would do things for free. Even you do swift transfers, they charge you a fee or commission. So its better to use paypal as they are very reliable and quick at the same time

the days of free are long gone. everyone will charge you something and they all want a piece of your cake. I use a merchant account I got through merchantinc.com because they deposit my money directly in to my checking account but there is a processing fee of 1.99% for that that is taken off the top of each transaction. Cash or check is the only thing that isn't going to cost you.

Pretty much all you need is PayPal and Credit card processor. They all take commissions.

I've not used 1stshopping cart but use Cheddargetter - great bit of kit but you will need to RTFM in order to integrate. Once integrated can handle all sorts of payment plans, discount vouchers etc.

What I like is that it goes beyond PayPal only to being a full payment gateway. It's based on a fixed fee per transaction so you'll have to do the math to work out whether it's most/less cost effective than other products out there!