International Currency Third Party Merchant Accounts

Through extensive research for this site, and trial and error in setting up our newest website we have succeeded in finding two third-party merchant account processors who will allow multi-currency payment acceptance - namely 2CheckOut and Multicards.

The intention of this article is to give our findings of these two processors to allow you to make an informed decision about who will be lucky enough to get your business.

As already stated, much of the impetous for this article was the setting up of an exclusive web design service specifically for UK businesses.

Unfortunately UK website design services tend to create sites solely for how attractive they are, generally having little idea what actually "sells" on the Internet.

It was therefore our aim to take what we'd learned over the last 6 years and create a service for those who really want a website that gets results.

To do this we needed to accept payments in UK pounds sterling rather than US dollars as we do on our other sites.

After much research we finally set up an account with both the aforementioned processors to test them out.

First-off then, let's give the hard-facts:

Company	2CheckOut	Multicards
Approval Time	5 minutes	24 hours
Currencies Accepted	12 currencies at present including US Dollars, £ sterling, Euros, Aus Dollars and Yen	US dollars, Euros, £sterling
Fees	$49 setup then 5.5% discount rate and $0.45 processing fee. Highly competetive rates by any standard.	Range of accounts - generally very expensive. $15 setup with discount rate of an unheard of 11.9%! Or discount rate as low as 5.9% but $500 setup fee and $350 annual fee. Wow!
Digital Products?	Yes	Yes
Realworld Products?	Yes	Yes
Recurring Billing?	Yes - any interval you specify	Yes - monthly or quarterly rebilling
Rolling Reserve	5% for 3 months	5% for 6 months

The most notable points arising from the table is that 2CheckOut offers a far wider range of currencies and is far, far more competetively priced.

2CheckOut also state that they accept virtually any type of business and you can literally sign up be ble to accept credit cards in a matter of minutes.

Another important aspect of third party processors I'd like to draw your attention to which further separates these two competitors is the order form your customers will use when purchasing any item from you.

As is standard, these order forms are provided for you by the merchant account provider.

However, the typical way in which these pages are generated is that one inputs some data - the cost of the product in question, the description, your company name etc., and the secure order page is automatically generated for you to link to. This is how 95% of all third party processors operate and how 2CheckOut work.

However, I was somewhat surprised when it came to setting up our test order page at Multicards in that in order to produce a professional-looking order page I feel it really is necessary to have a basic knowledge of HTML to create the page. Should you feel comfortable with this (as I am) it won't present a problem, but if you're new to the Internet, with little experience of HTML, this could cause you additional problems.

The only slight downside I can see of 2CheckOut in this respect (charging in local currencies) is that the default currency is in US dollars.

When visitors reach your order page they are then given the opportunity to select their own country which shows the charge in that currency. This is a slightly slower and more complicated way of doing it than Multicards seemingly more advanced system where your order form is in, say, £sterling with no messing around.

I think it's fair to say then, that all things considered, 2CheckOut gets out "Editors Choice" for the best international currency third party merchant account provider.

And as I say in our full review we've now had our account with them for what must be 2-3 years and they still continue to impress us and haven't missed a pay date yet.

To visit the 2CheckOut review please click here now.

Alternatively, check out Multicards here.

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