Review of Australian Merchant Accounts

Posted by Roger Keays, 17 February 2010, 3:56 PM

Having a good merchant facility goes a long way to simplifying the accounting for your business. Here are some quotes I got from several Australian banks when I set up the merchant account for Sunburnt Web Solutions. They are separated into two types of accounts: gateway accounts, which can be linked directly to your website so all payments can be made automatically, and MOTO (Mail-Order, Telephone-Order) accounts, which let you login to the bank's website to process credit card payments manually.

The quotes I was given were based on volumes of 50 transactions / month with an average transaction amount of $100. You should definitely check with the banks for the latest prices.

  ANZ Bendigo
StGeorge BankWest NAB CommWeb
Gateway 
Setup $99 $195 $275 $575   $484
Annual $30 - -   -
Monthly $40 $40 $55 $30   $44
Transaction Fee 4.9% or
$50/month*
~1.8% 2.75% 1.69%
+13c
  1.65% +28c
or $22/month*
Exit Fee - $250 < 12mth -     $110
MOTO
Setup   $100   $35 $80  
Annual   -   - $28  
Monthly   $25   $19.50 $7  
Transaction Fee ~1.8% 1.69%
+12c
1.5% local
2.75% int
+35c
 
Exit   $250 < 12mth   $1000 < 12mth,
min 3yrs
$150  

* whichever is greater

Some additional notes:

Since Sunburnt payments are subscription based, I ended up choosing Bendigo Bank with their batch payment processing, and manually process the payments twice a monthly with the help of some scripts I wrote for my accounting system. It works reasonably well.

For instant online payments I would probably choose St George's gateway because they seemed to have a pretty good API for programmers. Don't worry, nobody paid me to say that.

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