[seanharper]

Yah, getting a merchant account is a pain in the butt, but I think you are overstating it a little. The jury is out on whether merchant accounts or paypal have more onerous reserves.

There is a wide ecosystem of payment processors that like to sign up startup ecommerce businesses. Note, your local bank isn't included in that group, they probably won't want you as a customer.

If you use tokenization or recurring transactions and don't store the card data on your local server (same situation as paypal, btw) PCI requirements are very minimal and won't cost you anywhere near $2k.

[karsa]

Note: I am one of the people who have moved away from Paypal, I have become PCI compliant (which I did myself for 250 euros) but this I think would really cost 2k plus for any company. It took me a week to navigate. I ended up setting up a simple solution for others to help them efficiently with this http://www.pcicompliancesaq.com

However, the whole process was tedious, I went all the way through due diligence which took about 4 weeks with one merchant who then wanted a 5.25% rate plus about 500 month in fees.

I finally found a sensible merchant who offered me 3.5% and sensible rates, who I am extremely pleased with, their support is great and now I'm through the other side I am very pleased I have.

The payment gateway is much quicker and smother than sending clients to Paypal and then having them be returned to my site (which in a small % fails because clients interrupt the process needing me to manually configure).

But all in all it's easier to start your company with Paypal then move to a merchant account later when you have some trading history and the time and resources to invest.

But don't be under the impression that you will get going as simple as you did with Paypal.