I live in Mexico and have an account with BANAMEX, Banco Nacional de
México.
I want to be able to offer to my clients an easy way for them to use
their credit cards from whatever Latin American country, to order my
products of books, booklets, videos and audio cassettes on-line from
my web page,  www.creacionistas.com   and to pay for the postage or
shipping fees. All prices are in dollars USA and would be paid and
received accordingly.
Thank you.
John the Chemist

This is an interesting question, one I have some experience with.

There are a few companies that offer to be your middleman in handling
credit card transactions. One that I have experience with is called
PayPal:

http://www.paypal.com/

The service works like this. You sign up for a PayPal account and
verify it with a credit card and bank account in your name or your
business name (PayPal works with most local Mexican banks.) After they
verify that the accounts are yours, you can begin accepting PayPal
payments. Users can use your email address to have money sent to you
from their credit card or PayPal account, or you can build an online
store with a shopping cart and different items. PayPal has several
options for handling local sales taxes, if applicable, and various
options for handling shipping and handling fees.

Setting up was very easy for me, but I don’t have any experience as an
international user. I do handle business with many international
customers however, and I’ve never had any problems.

You can view a PayPal information page on international use here:

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_help-ext&eloc=0&loc=170

PayPal makes money by charging small fees for various transactions.
The following  fees apply to non-US users only, and you can view the
basic fee matrix here:

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/fees-outside

There is a US$1.50 fee to make a withdrawal, and a sliding percentage
scale to accept payments that is never higher than 2.9 per cent.

There are some competing services to PayPal. BillPoint is a company
associated with eBay auctions. PayDirect is a service offered by
Yahoo. And C2it is a service offered by CitiBank:

http://www.billpoint.com/
http://paydirect.yahoo.com/
http://www.c2it.com/

All of these services operate generally in the same way as PayPal, but
offer varying features and fees. Some may offer lower fees for some
transactions or better support for certain transactions. Epinions.com
has a thorough list of competing companies and user reviews:

http://www.epinions.com/finc-Billing-All

Not everyone is satisfied with PayPal. A site called “NoPayPal” has an
exhaustive list of customer complaints with PayPal. My personal
experience has been a good one, but you may want to see what some
unhappy customers have to say:

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

Online payment services offer a low barrier-of-entry to accepting
credit card payments online. But if you planning a high-volume
enterprise that would make the logistics of this impossible, you
should investigate opening a account through Banamex. In the US you
can open what is called a “Merchant” account that will allow you to
process credit card transactions and other more advanced business
transactions. Setup fees for these types of accounts are high end
require significant work on your end to process payments, or the
payment of fees to a third-party to process the transactions. Your
bank can offer you detailed information on how this process works.
Many web site providers offer this service as well.

Search terms used:

Paypal reviews
Ebay credit card payments
Paypal

---

Request for Answer Clarification by pendleton-ga on 27 Jun 2002 18:42 PDT

I already have PayPal and that has not solved my problem. Thanks for
your attempt, and it will be better if I could just accept credit cars
as I stated.
Thank you. 

John P.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by pendleton-ga on 27 Jun 2002 18:52 PDT

2---- To my knowledge, PayPal is not available to ALL Latin American
countries.

Biggies like Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador (the use US dollars)and I
don't know which other ones, but definitely not ALL of them.

Thanks.

John P.

---

Clarification of Answer by a_butler-ga on 27 Jun 2002 20:19 PDT

If PayPal or similar services won't work for you, you'll need to
pursue setting up a merchant account.

Your first stop should be the ISP who hosts your website. Most offer
Merchant Account setup for a fee, and a per-transaction cost similar
to the ones PayPal charges.

My ISP, Hostway, makes it very easy to setup a merchant account
allowing you to process credit card transactions on your website:

http://www.hostway.com/ecommerce/faq.htm

When you establish a merchant account, it will be tied to your
existing bank account.

If you do not have an ISP who provides Merchant Accounts, try Banamex.
I know that Citibank offers similar services for US customers.

If Banamex can't provide you with the account, try a thrid-party
merchant company. Be careful, many of these are located "off-shore" in
Caribbean banks in countries like Bermuda. But they do provide
end-to-end services for accepting credit cards and processing the
payments. An example:

http://globalmerchantcards.com/

A final option is to lease or purchase a Point-of-sale terminal from
your bank to process credit card transactions off-line. Depending on
your slaes volume, this may be cost-prohibitive.

Sorry for the confusion with the original answer. I'd be happy to
continue clarifying if you have specific questions.

I did not include my search terms with the original answer. I'll
include them here.

Search terms used:

merchant account international
linkpoint
banamex
credit card payments

Dear A_Butler: You deserve a 5-star rating. Though I don't have my
credit card collecting on-line account set up yet, you went a long way
in my book to sort out lots of stuff and give me the answer. You
earned the $10 in my estimation. Too bad Global Merchants Cards
charges $900 bucks to get with them, but then this is service (in my
case) to some 25 countries, if we include Spain, Equatorial Guinea and
Andorra.

God bless you to know and do His will!
John the creationist chemist