Realex & Card Cutters for Payment Gateway

[fastpat27]

Hi Guys

Has anyone ever had dealing with Card Cutters, they are a payment management company who Realex have recommended to manage the payments through their gateway. I am having problems with them answering PCI compliance questions, and their fees seem rather high for setup, although their rates per transaction are fairly keen. Below is their rate they quoted, I believe these can vary if you start turning over 100's of thousands of pounds.

My issue is the £150 setup fee and the PCI Compliance Fee for an ecommerce start up, it's a big expense to begin with if your website doesn't do well. Other companies like Global Payments and World Pay don't have setup fees like this from past experience. As my client filled in the paperwork for the account they got confused with all the technical questions, all the different fees for different services, virtual terminals and physical terminals, the PCI Compliance on top of that. Unfortunately they filled all in and sent it through before I seen what was happening and now can't get out of it. They can cancel the contract within 30 days but still have to pay all setup fees.

The PCI Compliance is quite expensive too at £8.75 per month, this is a self assessment where you answer a lot of questions about your network system and data processing and handling procedures, examples would be does your router have a unique password and not the default one, do you hold customer data on your PC or a server, or on paper anywhere, if so who has access to it, do you keep paper copies locked up, do you destroy it securely when not needed. It really is a minefield, and once done why does it require a monthly fee? Yes, once a year review to see if anything has changed, but just another ongoing fee out of hard to earn profits.

Realex & Global Payments was the last companies I dealt with for PCI Compliance, they suggested an external company Security Metrics to do the PCI Compliance through, this costs £3.50 per month and is charged by Global Payments. I suggested using an external company to Card Cutters but they didn't seem to want to know and didn't seem to know if they could accept an external company doing the PCI Compliance. This sort of makes it confusing or else the client will just have to pay the £8.75 per month.

Does anyone have any advice on all the different components to getting online payments setup, what these components do and what costs should we expect? I'm confused at all the different parts to be covered, I understand we need a gateway and a bank, but after that who does the PCI Compliance and the need for a management company to handle transactions, this baffles me!

To be honest this all probably doesn't make sense, and I'm maybe over complicating it, it should just be so simple to do this, but every company seems to make it so complicated and passes the buck for each process that has to be setup.

Going to shave my head now, and drink wine, can't even think what emoji is needed here!


Regards
FP


CARD CUTTERS FEES
No Minimum Monthly Service Charges 
No Authorisation Charges
No Rental Fees
 
Set Up Fee: £150
PCI: £8.75
 
Credit cards: 0.6% 
Debit cards: 0.35%
Commercial credit: 1.8% 
Commercial debit: 0.35%
 
Non 3DSecure Transactions: 
Credit cards: + 0.1%
Debit cards: +£0.10p
 
International transactions: +1.5% (Non EU/UK) 
Refunds: £0.25
Paper statements (OPTIONAL): £2.50