After having a membership site set up for a while I decided I needed to sell individual products as well. Some internet marketers even advise to sell the membership as an ‘add on’ to an existing product. The problem for me was Extreme Member (the software vendor I was using) didn’t really support individual products (although they insist they do). The reason I say they don’t is that they actually create a subscription in paypal even though it is effectively a one-time payment. They also create a membership for each client (when it isn’t necessary for an individual purchase). Even if they did support it, I sell products on other websites of mine so I couldn’t use EM for everything without creating multiple accounts with them. But I digress…

So the need to sell individual products, have them added to an autoresponder after purchase, and also sell memberships led me to eventually choose 1ShoppingCart. I signed up for 1 year which was about $1000 but which is a little cheaper than paying by the month. Unfortunately 1SC doesn’t integrate with Paypal for subscription payments!. So that forced me to set up a merchant account and gateway so I can take credit cards online for membership sites.

I originally called Moneris being in Canada and they said I’d have to pay $500 + $50/month PER WEBSITE. I explained that I used a shopping cart for all my websites and they said it didn’t matter, due to credit card rules. So, bye!

Authorize.net sent me an application form to fill out which wasn’t too bad. But along with the form are the gateway and merchant account fees. $99 setup fee, Monthly gateway fee $10, transaction fee $.10, Per Transaction Fee – $0.25, Visa/Master Card Qualified Discount Rate – 2.19%, Monthly Statement Fee – $9.95, Monthly Minimum Fee – $25. Nice.

Then, even though I filled out the gateway and merchant account forms I find out they are using a 3rd party to do the merchant account. So the new company sends me 8 pages of forms with some of the data transferred incorrectly. I have a ton of questions as it’s quite complex and I’m not in the US, so I call them and they don’t respond. So I call the original salesman from Authorize.net and he says basically ‘talk to them’. When I hire a company I expect to do business with them rather than one of their outsourced subcontractors.

These merchant accounts must be loving all these transaction fees, monthly fees, and minimum charges. They almost put banks to shame!

Luckily my new wordpress wishlist member plugin works with paypal, but also integrates with GetResponse. One of the main problems with just using paypal for payments is you don’t get the emails added to an autoresponder upon purchase. And GetResponse is going to be integrating with 1ShoppingCart so you can use the cart but have GetResponse manage the emails (if you use GetResponse and want to lower your 1SC costs).

P.S. Don’t email me with offers from your company. That ship has sailed.