ZIPBOX News

Paul Wright – Wednesday February 8th 2012


ZipBox Media’s all-in-one digital storefronts mean you can take payment without having to deal with extra vendors and fees.

One of the many challenges of creating a digital storefront is figuring out how to accept credit card payments. To accept the payments, businesses either have to open their own merchant account (which is a pain), or use PayPal or Google Checkout (both of which are less secure).

ZipBox Media customers can avoid that hassle. We use our own merchant account to process your customers’ payments, then send the money along to you. The result is lower fees and a whole lot less hassle, saving you money and time.

Joe Smith, a visual communications and branding expert who handles art and code for ZipBox Media, outlines in the video below just how nice it is to avoid the normal payment hassles:

Setting up your own merchant account is a time-consuming process that involves forming a relationship with a banker, going through credit checks, purchasing terminals or payment processing software and paying fees. And other fees. And more fees.

With ZipBox Media, you avoid that hassle since payment processing is included with the service. We do charge a fee to cover our expense, but it’s lower — and much simpler — than the fees you’ll see elsewhere. That includes the fees from PayPal and Google Checkout, which a lot of small businesses use to power their digital stores.

One of the main problems with each service — aside from their higher fees — is the fact that your customers’ traffic is routed to a separate site in order to process payment. Not only does it take your customer away from your website, it also exposes them to potential fraud.

PayPal and Google Checkout have taken steps to beef up their security, but they’re not foolproof — and they are juicy targets for hackers. PayPal has been a target of so-called "Man in the Browser" attacks that use a Trojan virus to infect web browsers, then piggyback extra transactions — designed to be invisible to both the customer and PayPal — onto customer orders. PayPal last year admitted to merchants that a set of programming bugs allows some malicious customers to "shop for free" — steal — from some vulnerable shops served by PayPal.

Google is a newer service, but it has already had problems with bugs — including one that leaked customer phone numbers, which thankfully went only to merchants.

With ZipBox Media, you get the ability to process secure payments without having to use yet another third-party vendor. It’s all included in the service. Like every other aspect of running your digital storefront, we aim to make it easy and safe.