Payment Gateways
Choices for payment gateway in Australia are usually focused on:
Other Payment Gateways
There are other payment gateways but they tend to have higher fees than the above options and are not particularly more convenient. Many of the internet merchant account providers are based in the USA and are not setup to have Australian merchants.
PayPal
With PayPal being the most popular way of accepting credit cards owing to its zero fees per month account and $0.30 + 2.4% transaction fee. The fee can drop as you sell more with the first threshold being $1500 / month for a 1.8% fee instead of 2.4%.
Do not use your personal account with PayPal for your website payments. Setup a free paypal business account. Use your official website email address like sales@yourwebsite.com.au rather than a hotmail or gmail account. That email address will be seen by your customers and it looks more professional to use your business email domain.
eWAY
eWAY is a great provider to work with and can connect to any bank merchant account. The account can be used as a virtual terminal on phones, tablets and computers and their customer service and ability to provide technical assistance is way ahead of what we get from the banks usually.
A major benefit of using eWAY for credit card payments is that the payment details can be entered on your website rather than directing the buyer to a hosted page that looks unlike your website design. Depending on the number of transactions the cost to have credit card processing this way is going to be somewhere around $1 per day plus the percentage fee.
eWAY Merchant Account
eWAY provide a way for avoiding using the banks. A payment gateway can be setup in a week and they don’t have piles of incomprehensible signup paperwork like the banks. Setting up a merchant account with a bank is possibly one of the most frustrating processes you can go through in setting up an online store, avoid it if possible.
Using eWAY Merchant Services, you can sign up for both an Internet Merchant Account and a Gateway with EWAY. They have cut the time to setting up a Merchant Account from typically 4+ weeks to under a week so you can be online and accepting payments promptly and not holding up the launch of your website.
Details are here: eway.com.au/pricing
The fees are going to work out at about $1 per day and $0.30 + 2.2% per transaction.
Offline Payment Methods
Generally we avoid using Direct Bank Transfer, Cheque or Cash because it adds to the administration workload for the website, there is a delay in confirming payment received and people shopping online typically want to pay and complete the transaction.
Offline Credit Card Transactions
It’s best to avoid using a physical eftpos terminal in your store to manually process payments as phone orders. It might be contrary to the conditions of the terminals use with the bank and you open yourself up to fraud and chargebacks in a way that you would not as likely experience with people who visit a retail store.
