[Hidden-tech] PayPal alternatives

[Herb Singleton]

I've been using PayPal to accept payments for online sales for a couple of years now. It's worked well for me, but I have heard the various horror stories (accounts being locked, etc) so I always try to keep my eye out for alternatives.

The one thing that I really like about PayPal is they provide debit cards that can be used to access your cash *immediately* after a transaction. This is really useful to me since I can take money from sales and immediately turn it around to pay for shipping postage and restock without touching my reserve cash. For example, I can have a sale over the weekend, and be ready to go with cash in hand on Monday.

Amazon Payments and Google Checkout both have good word of mouth (and in fact I have an Amazon acct) but both rely on bank transfers and I always have bad luck with bank transfers, no matter what bank I've had.

I've looked and looked and haven't found another low-volume merchant account  that lets customers use credit cards and offers a debit card to merchants. Anyone have any suggestions for a vendor?  Supposedly moneybookers.com does offer debit cards (and decent rates) but they don't have any merchant information on their site and I'm hesitant to contact them for more information out of fear of being spammed to death.

Thx

Herb
--
    Herb Singleton, PE
    hsingleton at cross-spectrum.com
    Cross-Spectrum Labs: Sound & Vibration Consulting
    http://www.cross-spectrum.com