What to choose ... payment processing services

Hello everybody. I live in Eastern Europe and I want to start my own online shop. The problems are that I am new in this business and I really don’t know much about cc processing services. I would like for you to recommend and comment the important ones. Thank you very much.

Paypal is probably the easiest IMHO.

Amazon Zshop?
Yahoo store?

I think they both do credit card processing for you.
Getting your own merchant account may be difficult to do from Eastern Europe.

If you dont kind your money being held at thier disgration. They held 35 thousand of our money. Now 6 month later they are giving back 750 a week till the balance is cleared.

One word, before you do anything make sure that you research on any of those processing services, and is better to open an account from your side just to used as a link to the service you are going to used.

When it comes with bank, credit cards and personal accounts the INTERNET if full of fraudulent people that will take your money in a hard beat.



[edit on 21-1-2005 by marg6043]

If you want to add credibility to your business then go with someone like Verisign and use their payment services. Paypal is a scammer's delight and they also are quite good at freezing funds when they feel like it. Read up on them and you'll see.

Verisign is worth the money and that's all I set clients up with. Never a problem and done ahead of schedule. I'm not sure about Europe but in the US you'd need to incorporate to obtain a tax ID which is required for a commercial bank account which is required for a true merchant account.

This is why Paypal is so popular -- all those requirements are gone and anyone can sell anything online. Of course the question is, if you plan to attract western consumers, everyone knows that sending money to paypal overseas is a crapshoot.

Just some input from someone who has done a few of these and has used paypal.

Good luck on your venture!