MasterCard and Web.com have teamed up to create a solution both companies say will make it easier and faster for businesses to get paid online. The option is called Take-A-Payment and is now being offered as part of Web.com’s website design and hosting services. But it is built with MasterCard’s less than a year old Simplify Commerce development tools.
In a phone interview with Small Business Trends, Debbi Lechner, Vice President of Ecommerce Product Marketing at Web.com explained:
“A lot of small businesses count themselves out of the ecommerce solution. It’s very simple. It’s an opportunity for small businesses to get involved.”
Web.com offers a range of options from build-it-yourself Web design tools to design services, hosting, domain names etc., Lechner said.
For a cost of $9.95 per month, Web.com users can add Take-a-Payment to their websites. It allows customers to pay invoices, service fees and other payments using a credit card. Website owners are then charged 2.85 percent for each payment plus a fee of 30 cents per transaction.
Use Simplify Commerce on Your Own Website
You don’t need to be a Web.com customer to use MasterCard’s new Simplify Commerce service. If you’re building your own website or have contracted with a developer, you can incorporate the new MasterCard solution into that project, too.
Another unique feature is that Simplify Commerce lets you take payment from a variety of credit cards rather than just from MasterCard.
There are other payment options like PayPal and Square that offer an opportunity to accept a variety of credit cards. But this is the first one we can recall run by a major credit card company that lets you accept payments through a competitor’s card.
In another call with Small Business Trends, Debbie Barta, Simplify Commerce Product Lead at MasterCard Labs explained:
“Merchants are looking for a simple one-stop shop online payment. We make it very simple for merchants to get up and running.”
You can setup a Simplify Commerce account directly from the MasterCard site for free. However, you’ll probably need a basic understanding of programming or the skills of a developer to make it work for you.
Image: Web.com
Shawn,
This looks like a good idea.
I wonder if Web.com will offer Take-A-Payment as a stand-alone solution to those of with web hosting already?
Franchise King®
Hi Joel,
It’s a good question and one we don’t have a definitive answer to at the moment, but I’m sure as the program evolves we’ll learn more.
It’s a neat service. But I don’t get the idea of paying a set amount per month and then having charged for each transaction. It is either one or the other. You can launch the service for free and take some percentage of each transaction or ask for a monthly fee without taking anything from each transaction. That is just too much.
This is exactly what I was wondering. It sounds like their fees are similar to Paypal, yet they also want $10 a month? Seems like double dipping.
This is indeed a great service for businesses, small or large alike. Businesses can give customers a wider options to pay for their services.
More solutions to getting paid online via a website besides PayPal and Square. This gives users more choices to select the best option.
Actually, this one is pretty reasonable. We have a bank sponsored third party payment system and I review the monthly statement. It has more add-ons than Carter has peanuts, they charge if you sneeze. Add to that the surcharges for rewards cards – which can be terrible! They charge $9.95 for a monthly statement too. This is pretty standard in the industry as we have looked for a less expensive alternative to Interchange fees, etc, but when you get into the details and their contract, you get white knuckles.
The one payment form that they really need to make this a competitive and complete system IMHO is to accept checks (ACH) interface for check acceptance. They would get our business if we could take checks over the Inet.
If you are a small operations who takes few transactions, I can see where this would be expensive. Our Merchant Fees run between $600 and $800 a month. So, it would be a big savings for us. But no check ACH makes this a non-starter for us.