Save 40% on WorldPay fees

If you are already using WordPay to process credit cards, you know that you’re paying over the top for each and every transaction. You also know that it takes an eternity to receive the money from them – money you could be utilising much better than letting WorldPay sit on it for a few weeks.

You probably chose WorldPay in the beginning because it was relatively easy to get started and they sorted out all that merchant account stuff too. Now you’re paying a price for that convenience.

There is good news though. It’s relatively easy to switch from using WorldPay by leveraging your existing trading history with them.

WorldPay is only a payment gateway

The payment gateway part of the WorldPay service is the expensive bit. They’re probably charging you something like €1.50 per transaction compared to a typical fee of €0.20 charged by other payment gateways.

The other part of the WorldPay service is a regular NatWest merchant account (branded as Streamline) – and chances are, you’re already getting a fair commercial rate from this part.

Ideally, you want to keep the merchant account part and just replace the payment gateway part of the WorldPay service.

Give Streamline a call

Although both ultimately owned by The Royal Bank of Scotland, Streamline and WorldPay are separate buisnesses (even though WorldPay hooked you up originally with Streamline). This means it’s easy to call Streamline directly and tell them you want to open a new merchant account.

The paperwork process is shorter and faster because they already have first hand experience of your trading history via WorldPay – and you’ll find it much easier to stick with a Streamline merchant account than start from scratch with another bank.

I was concerned that they might try and protect the WorldPay business and refuse to talk to me but I guess they realise that some money is better than none (which is what they’d get if I was forced to open a merchant account with another bank).

Choose another payment gateway

Almost every gateway we evaluated supports a merchant account with Streamline. Switching payment gateway is definitely a non-trivial process but it’s not as scary as it first seems. In the end we opted to use Protx as our payment gateway. They seem to offer the best pricing and features for our requirements.

We discovered quite a few payment gateway alternatives when we were evaluating online replacements for QuickBooks.

Next Step: Evaluating online alternatives to QuickBooks

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