Online Payment Systems in Ireland

I'm having a little adventure with Online Payment systems at the moment. In Ireland there are essentially just two options. The first one is Paypal. The Second is Realex. PayPal is very easy to set up if you are selling products. Unfortunatley the company I'm working for is selling training courses. Setting up a price for a course is easy but setting it up so that the relevant dates are passed back and forth is another matter. Exit Paypal.

Enter Realex. An Irish online payment company. They accept Laser payments as well as Visa and Mastercard. We can run it all on our own site rather than sending our clients to their site to pay. They will talk me through the setup. Sounds perfect.

But there are hitches. There are requirements. The first is a Secure Cert. This wouldn't be a problem if the company didn't have their hosting with the least friendly and hardest to find webhosting company in Ireland. You would swear that they don't actually want any business. They are a computer shop that sweet talked the business owner into moving from a large and well respected hosting company to themselves where they provided less service than they should for way more money than they should have been charging. I'm not changing it over until the yearly contract expires but getting anything done with them is like pulling teeth! Enough of that little rant and back to the subject in hand.

They charge a €250 set up fee which didn't seem unreasonable given how much I will be relying on them for support in setting it up.

They charge just under €50 per month minimum for transactions (I think that's for 1900 transactions but don't quote me!). Now that's way more transactions than the max of 100 we are expecting! So that looks more like a bit of a rip off. But it's still getting the green light. Now all we need to do is open a Merchant Account with our bank to receive payments into. Great.

Wrong. More hoops. To set up a merchant account is about as straight forward as successfully operating on a hyperactive hamster with one hand and a blindfold on. They want 3 years accounts. They want projected sales, You can give a business plan rather than the accounts but they want you to show that you will have a rather substantial sum in turnover. If we were selling products then it all makes sense. We would have to have a huge turnover to support making a profit. With training courses the overheads are comparatively low. Profit margins are far higher than somebody selling cd's. Sales volume is lower though. Turnover is not that massive either, because the company is in a niche market. They should meet the limits the bank is insisting on but it is not guaranteed.

Once you have put a lot of work into gathering all the information together for the Merchant Account you can then have the pleasure of paying for it! Another €250 set up fee. More charges per transaction price depending on type of card. More percentages being taken.

It's not worth it. We are going back to the drawing board. I'll post here when I come up with an Online payment solution that helps assist profits rather than taking as big a chunk of them as possible.