Directly through Paypal. 

I can't process any refunds through AC, not even credit cards.  Though it looks like you should be able to do so, when I've tried it it just charges the customer again rather than refunding them. 

Deb,

Not sure what you are using as far as PayPal goes. Personally I use Virtual Terminal, which handles all my credit card transactions, including PayPal orders. Virtual Terminal is a normal credit card processor, works seamlessly with the checkout page. When you checkout on my site you are going through PayPal, but you would never know, unless you selected PayPal as your payment source. 

On virtual terminal I can pull up "payments received", click on the customer name, scroll down the page, click on Issue Refund, and either refund the entire amount or a partial amount. In addition to that, I can also put a note to the customer letting them know the reason for the refund. 

One very good feature of Virtual Terminal, is that it costs a flat $30 a month, there are no other charges. In the past I had a third party payment processor, IPayment, which took an additional percentage and a per transaction fee. Total ripoff, in my opinion, that bill was starting to get very hefty, and due to lack of knowledge, I paid it for quite some time. So, after I learned about Virtual Terminal, I eliminated the leech by switching to PayPal for all my payment transactions, except Google Checkout, which is a separate entity. The system integrates with AC perfectly, and it works better if you get a $60 secure certificate from GoDaddy, this allows virtual terminal to use an https url within your domain, so the customer is not transferred over to another site. A lot of browsers will warn when that happens, and render the site "unsecure", which is a bunch of BS, but given all the internet issues on TV, that in itself is enough to scare potential customers away.

Virtual terminal is something you may want to consider. Easy to use and integrate with AC.

Dont they take a percentage of your sales too like any credit card service?  Just curious because if not, I need to recommend this product more often.  I went to their website to see, this is all I could find which seems to have a 2.5-3% fee for each sale too.  Let us know, we are all deeply interested in flat fee transactions if they exist.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/merchant/VTPricing-outside 

Heather H:

Directly through Paypal. 

I can't process any refunds through AC, not even credit cards.  Though it looks like you should be able to do so, when I've tried it it just charges the customer again rather than refunding them. 

 Are you typing in a negative value into the order edit credit card area? A positive value will just try to charge the customer again.

 So if crediting the customer $100.00 type in -100.00

We are using PayPal Website Payments Pro for our merchant service and it comes free with virtual terminal for $30.00 a month. It integrates nicely with Americommerce, they are one of the supported gateways if you go through the list.

I prefer the flat fee that PayPal charges for transaction fees. You should be able to get at least 2.2% + $0.30 (currently if you average $10,000/month in sales) for each transaction for credit cards; we were able to secure a lower rate due to a previous agreement. 

They don't have a roaming percentage for rewards cards that many other merchant services do (some can get up to 3.5% for rewards cards not to mention those oddball additional charges).

So far, we have saved anywhere from 0.35% to 1.5% per transaction (roughly) compared to our old merchant service and we save an additional 0.5% on customers who pay with PayPal (which I've had to disable until Americommerce fixes the PayPal payment checkout so it goes directly to the PayPal login).

I know some merchants that are relatively small and getting 1.85/1.85 for visa mastercard transactions plus some nominal fee per transaction.  But they do get hit with all of the reward card fees and such.  Has anyone done the numbers to see if it makes more sense to go with the flat model PayPal is offering?  Seems to be working for BillRemnant above.  And it does seem easier to plan for.

Just wondering if others see the numbers working out too so I can recommend one over the other when asked. 

Esturrock,

When I was with GoEMerchant I had to have IPayment, at the time I had just started accepting credit cards, so I did not know any better. The second I found out that PayPal doesn't utilize such a system, going to Payments Pro was a no brainer. 98% of my decision to come to Americommerce was based on that fact alone. The year prior to going to AC my IPayment costs were $14K. Overall I would say the percentage added up to about 5% depending on which card the customer used, and whether it was a corporate card or not. The % was NEVER under 3%. I have never seen the 1.85%, ever. On one $3K order 3% is $90, that alone is 3 months worth of PayPal Website Payments Pro flat fees.

When you talk about 5% on a 3000 or 4000 dollar order, you are talking about giving a lot of "free product" away. It's highway robbery, and it's a huge amount of $$$. IF, they gave you some type of protection, I would be more understanding, but in this business if you get a fraudulent order, you are out of the money and out of the product. Neither the credit card, nor the thief lose out.  This is why I see payment solutions such as PayPal and Google Checkout becoming more important to merchants as time passes. I have been tempted to eliminate the credit cards all together and only using PayPal and GC, however the rest of the world is not ready for that yet. As the PCI compliance issues get more and more expensive, the CC companies are going to work themselves out of small business because the overhead of accepting credit cards is going to be unsustainable. 

On large orders I always give the customer the option of paying with a personal check, in exchange for a 3% discount. Given the economy a lot of my phone order customers opt for that option. I never get large orders via the website, most of these are over the phone, which is a plus for me, because I can offer the option to the customer.

Louis,

I like your idea of offering a discount for a check item as opposed to credit cards...

AC - anyway to make a discount automatic based on payment type? This is better than adding a % based on payment type as that may come as a suprise to custoemrs during checkout (the extra % for using CC) and increase abandonment.

thanks!

Brian,

I think you are going to get a good laugh out of this, but I don't think you can make those offers publicly. I distinctly remember the gas stations having to repeal their cash pump vs. credit card pump prices at one time. If memory serves me correctly, I think that was outlawed by the credit card companies via their "merchant agreements".

What I find extremely interesting is the Bing.com/Jellyfish approach, where the customer get's cash back on each sale (discount), and Bing gets the same. Basically if the merchant offers 10%, the customer gets 5% and Bing gets 5%, then the merchant takes the hit for the CC charges as well. I was going to participate, however when I found out that they also add an additional 2% discount to anything else in the cart, I opted not to get involved, 15% of gross is ridiculous. I will be working for Bing and the CC's. 

There is an option out there, Revolution Card, which has a really low merchant rate. The problem is these guys never answer their messages. I have been trying for a year to talk to someone at Revolution, but have had no luck, so I finally gave up on their "revolution".  I am beginning to think that it's some type of bank scam, it seems they only accept certain payment processors. I have to assume that there is some sort of 3rd party involved that gets a piece of the action. Wish they would reply though, I may be wrong in my assumptions, it really does sound like a good thing.