Opening a Moneybookers merchant account

We hadn’t used Moneybookers before, having always preferred PayPal. Until one of our recent clients who had used them in the past – and really liked the system – asked us to incorporate on-line payments into the site we built for him. The client offers airport transfers in Lanzarote, and he was keen to find a low cost and reliable merchant account option through which he could accept credit cards.

Moneybookers has in the end turned out to be an excellent choice – as always opening the merchant account took a bit of time, they wanted to see the working site, and of course – lots of bits of paper related to the business – as anyone company working within the law is bound to do. It took a bit of time to get going but the way the system work it doesn’t stop working on the site as you can add your buttons which apply to the standard account and the credit card options are added when the merchant account is approved.

Opening the merchant account was FREE (always a good thing), and Moneybookers commission rates are low at only a  1.9% compared to PayPal‘s 3.4% (plus a €0.35 transaction fee) that saving alone was enough to persuade us to open an account!

On the downside – As web designers we didn’t find their site either particularly user friendly, there’s a learning curve when you are used to using PayPal – and support wasn’t particularly quick when needed. However, the advantage outweighs these minor gripes, the reduced fees are enough for us to suggest that anyone give them a try….