Canadian payment gateway

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alex.barylski
DevNet Evangelist
Posts: 6267
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: Winnipeg

Canadian payment gateway

Post by alex.barylski »

I have a client who wants to sell products from a few stores - surplus kind of deal. He wants to use a single payment gateway, but have the ability to transfer money to others accounts programmatically either enmasse (monthly) or per transaction.

This is for a Canadian store and will likely always stay that way, small and focused.

I have been told Moneris (CIBC) is a good solution, but will they give enough flexibility to charge visitors and transfer funds into individual accounts regardless of their bank/branch/etc? So customers with TD bank or Royal can still get their monthly cheques?

Cheers,
Alex
josh
DevNet Master
Posts: 4872
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2004 3:23 pm
Location: Palm beach, Florida

Re: Canadian payment gateway

Post by josh »

gateway != bank transfer.

Gateway is an API for a merchant account. Merchant account is a thing that deposits money into a plain old bank account. Having an API on your plain old bank account is not the same as a gateway.

Authorize.net rocks, not the absolute cheapest but one of the best. You can get merchant accounts, gateways, or both.

Merchant companies pay you how & when they want. If they want to deposit it next day, they will. If they want to mail you a check 8 months later, they'll just as readily do that. It varies by payment amount, "risk" of the payment, the customer's geographic location, the card type, etc.. (Ex. american express processes payments thru their system and pays you directly via check). Additionally your merchant account company may hold all outstanding funds for an indefinite (as far as i know) amount of time. They have lied to me verbally saying they are holding 50% for 6 months, and held it for 18 instead, etc..

They'll just as quickly pull money *back out* of your account, like it or not. There is a dispute process for that though. That is where paypal is worse. If paypal screws up and fails to verify a buyer's payment info, they reverse the fees and charge you extra fees ontop of that for their failure.
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