[thelist] Merchant Accounts and Payment Gateways

Pringle, Ron RPringle at aurora-il.org
Mon Nov 19 14:01:08 CST 2007


I work with a non-profit and we are in the process of trying to set up online payments for our annual conference, and for membership registration and renewals.

We think we're going to be using RegOnline [0] for the event management end of things. I find myself confused by the whole payment gateway/merchant account thing. As I understand it, we need a payment gateway that will work with our merchant account. But I am unclear whether the merchant account has to be a service of our actual bank account, or if it separate and connects to our bank account.

For gateways, I've been looking mainly at Verisign (Paypal) Payflo Pro, as it seems the cheapest for the amount of transactions we'll have. Another option would be Authorize.Net.

Where can I find a good tutorial or primer on this whole process (I've tried Googling but I think I'm not using the proper terms to get the results I want), and does anyone have any particular issues or experiences with either Payflo Pro or Authorize.Net that they would care to share?

Thanks!

Regards,
Ron


p.s. If anyone knows of other event/membership management software that I should be looking at, please feel free to suggest. I've looked at WildApricot, CVent and RegOnline seriously, and to a lesser degree 123SignUp and a few other lesser products.

[0] http://www.regonline.com/



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