Thanks. I am going to have to go with a simpler solution than that at this point. Volusion offers a free cart with their basic webhosting plan and connects to WPPro at PayPal, so I will consider them. If anyone knows of an easier and cheaper way to do it, please let me know! The host I am using has some good features, but lacks the ability to do API coding or otherwise connect with WPPro. So I have to set up a subdomain elsewhere to handle payments which involves a second website or simply move my website, which I don't want to do at this time. I may move it eventually.

What I've found is that those that say they charge less on a percent of transaction basis have stiff fees for rewards cards and the per transaction fee is high which works against me because I bill under $10 per transaction. There are other things like SSL fees with some, not with others, cancellation fees, sign-up fees etc. PayPal is one of the few that had sliding rates so when your business actually is succeeding your costs go down whereas some of the others have fixed rates.

I happen to need a virtual terminal to enter transactions myself on the web or by swipe on site and recurring billing (which PayPal charges $30 a month for in addition to the $30 WPPro fee). Still, PayPal seems to be the winner if you are planning for success with such a business. Moving a subscription based service would be a huge negative, since all of one's subscribers would have to resubscribe. They would not likely do so at a certain rate and business would be lost. So having the scaling rate feature at PayPal is a big plus.

Google checkout seems to be flimsy at the moment. They are at the level of Website Payments Standard which forces customers to go to the PayPal site to pay and then return to your site. Not the most professional solution perhaps. By the way, for recurring payments, the customer MUST sign up for a PayPal account with Website Payments Standard.

My view? The whole area of payments is massive and often deliberately confusing, so you have to line up all the fees in a spreadsheet to truly compare different solutions. And you have to do it considering the price range of your products, because the per transaction fees will kill you if they are high and you have a lot of < $10 charges for example.

Just some observations from several days of research!

Again, if anyone knows of a host with great payment system rate access, great shopping cart and great support and low fees, please let me know!

All the best,

David

SunAndStormInvesting.com