Like almost any other company that is out there today we need to accept credit card payments for our products on scrubadoo.com.

To give you a quick background I used to work with and sell merchant services while I worked at BB&T so I am fairly familiar with the product and the sales process. There are a slew of merchant service providers out there that you can use, making this decision process one of those research tasks that you really don’t look forward too.

Here are a few lessons learned about the overall merchant services industry:

There is a difference between a gateway and a processor.  For online sales you need both.  The gateway is the front end that collects the information and then sends it to the processor.  Most of the time the gateway and the processor are different companies.  Authorize.net is one of the big gateways that you may have heard of.  The processors are “partnered” with certain gateways.  Processors are the ones that process the payments securely and work with the bank card associations to make sure the entire credit card transaction runs smoothly.

Aside from price (I will get to that in the next post) one thing to look for in your “processor” is if they are actually a processor.  There are a ton of companies out there that are the merchant services equivalent of a mortgage broker.  They are basically a sales force that sign up users and then sell the processing off to real merchant “processors” for a fee.  They do not keep your account so all of your interactions, customer service needs, etc after the sale will be with some new company.

You as a merchant will end up paying the majority of your fees to your processor.  There may be a set up fee for the gateway and a small monthly fee but aside from that the majority of your interactions will be with the processing company.

That is a quick rundown of the merchant landscape.  I will follow up with a fee’s post the next time I have some time.

-Brett

I am pretty much an eternal optimist.  So when contractors I have hired tell me it is going to take about two weeks and $500 to complete a project I usually assume it is going to take about two weeks and $500 to complete.

My experience to this point has taught me otherwise.  Every web based project we have started on has taken us about twice as long and cost us about twice as much as we had anticipated.  I was warned of this when I started but I didn’t really believe it (again I am an optimist).

I don’t know if this is intentional or it is just the way it “works” with web development companies but it is extremely frustrating.  I have learned that a lot of it comes down to communication.  Web developers speak a different language than I, or most people, do.  Even after we have had several conversations and I think everyone is on the same page, two days later I will get a response to solicited critique I have made of the project’s progress.  The response is typically something like “You hadn’t specified that the site needed that functionality”  when I thought the fact that we needed a specific functionality was very clear.  So the developer tacks on another 15 hours of work.

One thing I have learned is that diagrams are very helpful, they are in no way a cure-all, but they seem to make sure everyone is visualizing the same picture.  Most of the developers I have worked with are pretty good at providing these to me and I now always ask for one as a part of their bid.  It shows me that they understand what I want and that everyone is at least close to being on the same page.

I thought scrubadoo.com would launch July 1  It is now July 16th and we are still chugging along on the programming side.  Hopefully we will be finished soon.