How much are you paying for credit card fees?

I don't have any hard proof but I am pretty sure that we must have been one of the first wholesalers to accept payments through our website as we have been processing almost since the first day we set up 10 years ago.

When we first set the website up our website developer recommended Worldpay and we were happy to follow their recommendation.

We have never really had any issues with them except a lurking suspicion that we were paying too much in credit card fees and that waiting 7-10 days for the money to be transferred to us was a bit long.

However just before Xmas we applied to Worldpay to accept Swedish Krona ready for Formex and in response, with no communication at all, they took £1000 from the monies owed to us and kept it as a "deposit"

So finally we have been given the push to look at alternatives to Worldpay and as per usual I will blog about our progress. I have no idea whether we will have the courage to move. The idea of something going wrong and being left without the facility to take credit cards quite frankly terrifies me! But we will do the preparation so at least we can make an informed decision

Costs

Worldpay charge us £160 per year service charge, 3.25% on all credit card transactions and 37p for debit cards.

If we were to change we would need to be dealing with 2 companies, one to manage the website side and the other to provide our Merchant ID

Payment providers are companies such as Secure Trading, Ogone and Sage all of which who charge approx £20 per month

Merchant ID are the banks. Since we bank with Lloyds we asked them and they are quoting 1.5% for credit cards and 25p for debit cards plus £5 per month service charge.

So we could end up paying £10 per month more in charges but our credit card fees will plummet. On these figures we currently pay £8.12 for a carriage paid order paid for by credit card and this will reduce to £3.75 so we will be even after just 2 orders

Thats the first part of the investigation completed. Now we have to look at how much work will be involved in integrating the new system in to our website, and how much it will cost.

Please let us know what you think, and if you have any recommendations, on our Facebook page

Update 5th Feb

The lovely Stephanie Carswell suggested Payment Sense to us via Facebook. Their terms, for doing exactly the same as Worldpay (ie we would only need to deal with one company, and not 2) are as follows

2% credit card fee vs 3.25% from Worldpay

35p for debit cards vs 27p from Worldpay

£10 monthly fee vs £13.30 from Worldpay

Set up fee £150

Stephanie also recommended their service which is great

We have also been given the website www.electronic-payments.co.uk which compares and contrasts the costs and charges from each service provider. I have tried it and it gives you reams of information so definitely one for those people who have not yet decided which provider to use. As a soft toy wholesaler my eyes crossed when I tried to use it to compare 2 different methods