Is this advice from Kuroi still valid?

I thought it best to ask this on the forum, rather than in a PM.

As I'm looking for a Payment Gateway, I wondered whether Kuroi's advice, at the end of the attached thread is still valid?

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121119&highlight=hsbc

I would agree with Karoi.

SagePay (we use CEON'S SagePay modules) will provide the link to your bank, but will act as the payment gateway from your site.

Once the payment has been processed by SagePay, they will forward it to HSBC and the money will appear in your HSBC account.

You probably have card processing services from HSBC, used when you process a payment off-line, or through a EPOS machine, but it is more reliable to trust SagePay with the website gateway side of things.

Thanks for the reply and confirmation.

It's a new site, online only, I intend to have an HSBC merchant account, and wanted a trouble-free way of running/maintaining a payment gateway. Makes sense to go for one that has been properly integrated with Zencart rather than attempt HSBC's integration. Anyway, I'm a fan of CEON's mods so I'll consider his add-ons carefully.

A bit troubled that there are other cheaper gateway solutions out there - makes it hard to decide, being a startup.

Running v1.50, so I'll need to check compatibility.

simon1066:

A bit troubled that there are other cheaper gateway solutions out there - makes it hard to decide, being a startup.

For start-ups, its very much a case of swings and roundabouts for payment gateway charges, and there is generally very little in it when comparing the fees and charges of the various gateway options.

In the "early days" of your online venture, the fees charged (by practically all gateways) will be relatively higher, because your transactional volume is likely to be low.

As business picks up, and the transactional values increase, you can then shop around for better deals, because the volume of transactions will be higher. It will make sense then to look at minimising the cost of fees, because the impact on bottom line will be greater.

In the short-term, you should factor the higher transactional fee into your pricing. Some people charge a "Card Processing Levy" - but customers hate this.

You may just have to "bite the bullet" in the short term and absorb the higher fee.

That's good advice, thanks. Of course you're right about costs reducing with time (hopefully), sort of knew that anyway as my wholesale discounts obviously improve with volume, hadn't really considered the impact on gateway services .

Seems you're on the mark with there being not much in the pricings, I've delved a little deeper with one of the cheaper ones and seen add-on costs + long contracts.

Some people charge a "Card Processing Levy" - but customers hate this.

And here is the US it's illegal.

I can't speak to the investment that the banks may (or may not) have made since I gave that advice, and SagePay had a bit of a service wobble last year. But despite that, I'd still repeat the original advice.

Payment modules are one of the trickiest and most sensitive parts of an e-commerce system, and both SagePay and Ceon's modules for them are extremely robust and effective.

The cost difference is marginal at most, and way cheaper than the time that we've invested in the past trying to get other services to work properly (before we adopted a policy of simply refusing to work with other payment gateways).

We even once had a client backup his site in the morning and restore it in the evening, wiping out his whole day's orders (several thousand dollar's worth). He was rescued by SagePay's transaction history which gave him everything needed to be able to fulfil the orders.