Hi

I have spent the best part of 2 hours sifting through the various websites of the approved payment processors ie Paypal, Google, Autorize.net, 2CO and World Pay.

It would appear to me that with the exception of Paypal none of these solutions are suitable for Canada.

Google, Autorize.net and World Pay do not effectively operate inside Canada. Paypal does as too 2CO - but both of these solutions are very unpopular and hence not widely used or trusted. People want to use credit cards with a Canadian payment processor.

What would be very very useful would be a feature on your website which cut through all this headache of trying to find a compatible card processor by offering a drop down where you select your country adn bingo it tells you which payment processor will work where.

I will have a real job persuading my customer to use a non Canada payment processor like 2CO who have no brand or trust in Canada. As for RBS world pay - forget that - no Canadian is going to call the UK for support.

Second of all you need a "How to" white paper for us HTML developers who understand code but have little experience in payment processing.

Sorry to sound negative - I really want to use CC, but it is feeling like a challenge right now.

All help or ideas from fellow Canadians or people who want to help this Canadian are gratefully received !

thanks Vincej

As you probably are well aware of, there are many, many merchants out there. The problem is not many of them provide an easy to use API for developers to connect with using development languages. Some are down right impossible. PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, 2CO and World Pay all have exceptionally well documented API's, They are also the top 5 merchants on the web. I am not sure why you think PayPal is very unpopular though. I think it is one of the worlds most widely recognized and used merchant.

Over time, I am sure we will be adding even more, but we have to select ones that have not only have a good brand, but also appeal to a large part of our audience. If we add a merchant that has a marginal brand awareness, it doesn't do our software any good because our users would not even know who they are.

Hi Scott - thanks very much for the rapid reply. I really do understand your point of view on this - it makes total sense, from a developers' standpoint.

The issue for me is not so much technical as commercial. Technically I can use 2CO. Technically I can use PayPal. The others are either wholly USA or World Pay is European.

My challenge is getting a small business owner to trust 2CO.

Paypal is great when you make regular purchases - I use it. This challenge with Paypal is that most people do not want the hassle of having to first set up a Paypal account when all they want to buy is a pound of tea. They just want to bang in their credit card and be done.

I guess bottom line is that if more Canadians bought CC then it would start to make commercial sense for you to jump through the Canadian Merchant hoops !

Thanks Vincej

Hiya Vincent,

I am thinking that maybe you are unaware that people can purchase from your sites with paypal without having an account and by just using their credit cards.

If you do a test run of a product on your own cart and go as far as the paypal site where it asks you what you want to do basically, if you look to the left a bit you'll see an area where you can input a credit card without having an account at all as a customer. What you could do is take a screenshot and cut that small area out and show that on your site (put a nice circle or something around the area of importance) so people know where to go if they don't have a paypal account.

Thanks Jo !!

You are very perceptive You put your finger right on it ! I understand PHP , HTML and CSS - yesterday I knew squat about payment processing.

Tonight, after have read the T&C's of nearly every processor out there I can now see some of the for the trees.

When I started using Pay Pal I believed I was requered to create an account - now I see I am not - so I guess in Canada the easiest thing is just offer Paypal and nothing else right ?

Many thanks Vince

You're quite welcome, glad it was something easy enough to work out for ya, good luck with it