International Currency Third Party Merchant Accounts

The intention of this article is to give our findings of these two processors to allow you to make an informed decision about who will be lucky enough to get your business.

As already stated, much of the impetous for this article was the setting up of an exclusive web design service specifically for UK businesses.

Unfortunately UK website design services tend to create sites solely for how attractive they are, generally having little idea what actually "sells" on the Internet.

It was therefore our aim to take what we'd learned over the last 6 years and create a service for those who really want a website that gets results.

To do this we needed to accept payments in UK pounds sterling rather than US dollars as we do on our other sites.

After much research we finally set up an account with both the aforementioned processors to test them out.

First-off then, let's give the hard-facts:

The most notable points arising from the table is that Paysystems offers a far wider range of currencies and is far, far more competetively priced. Interestingly, at the time of writing this article, Paysystems are providing a guarantee on their fees - they pledge to beat any other processing fees you've been offered by 10% - making their account almost risk free.

Paysystems state that they accept virtually any type of business, including mail order companies and make a particularly interesting point about hidden fees.

When credit cards are charged, they are not simply approved by the merchant account provider - they are given a "level" of approval. For example, a US merchant account, accepting orders from US citizens would normally compare the address given on the order form with the address to which the credit card was registered which adds another layer of security against fraud protection.

However, if a customer orders from outside the US it is far harder to use address verification services so this aspect tends not to be used for overseas transactions.

These sales are known as mid or low qualified cards because there is an increased chance of these being fraudulent sales. This higher risk means that some merchant account providers will charge a higher (unpublished) fee for accepting such cards.

Clearly if you're accepting orders primarily from a non-US country - you're going to experience a lot of these. Paysystems, therefore, is one of the few processors who have made it company policy to charge exactly the same low rate for such payments - despite the increased risk for them. We approve of their openness, honesty and service with regards to this matter.

Another important aspect of third party processors I'd like to draw your attention to which further separates these two competitors is the order form your customers will use when purchasing any item from you.

As is standard, these order forms are provided for you by the merchant account provider.

However, the typical way in which these pages are generated is that one inputs some data - the cost of the product in question, the description, your company name etc., and the secure order page is automatically generated for you to link to. This is how 95% of all third party processors operate and how Paysystems work.

However, I was somewhat surprised when it came to setting up our test order page at Multicards in that in order to produce a professional-looking order page I feel it really is necessary to have a basic knowledge of HTML to create the page. Should you feel comfortable with this (as I am) it won't present a problem, but if you're new to the Internet, with little experience of HTML, this could cause you additional problems.

I think it's fair to say then, that all things considered, Paysystems gets out "Editors Choice" for the best international currency third party merchant account provider.

To visit Paysystems now, click here and select the "Merchant IBA" option on their homepage.

Alternatively, check out Multicards here.

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The best international merchant account provider we've found