If you are selling online and you are not using a Payment Bureau such as we discussed earlier, then you must have a merchant facility otherwise your customers will not be able to buy from you using their credit cards! Here we will look at one particular example of a credit card payment processing system provided by a bank for those who already have a merchant account, as an example of the kinds of facilities which are offered by banks. Although rather expensive as we discussed earlier, you may have other reasons for going down this route.

Fortunately in our remote location we have the excellent services of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

For some 6 years or more we have used the Royal Bank of Scotland WorldPay eSolution service. TOPS© software integrates with Royal Bank WorldPay facility to provide a straightforward and simple to use solution.

We were one of the very first businesses to use the WorldPay merchant facility - although initially it was called Royline, then Streamline. Then the Royal Bank of Scotland took over NatWest Bank and their facilities became one-and-the- same. We understand that Clydesdale Bank uses the same credit card processing facility too. Of course we had been a Royal Bank of Scotland merchant for several years before we started to use the WorldPay facility. Other banks such as Lloyds TSB, Barclays, and HSBC do often have their own equivalent to the Royal Bank of Scotland WorldPay service. However, in some cases these banks make it almost impossible for a small business to use, as they insist on a hardware firewall and an additional server - ensuring that it is far too costly an option for a small business to even consider.

There are other developers who have created a common interface that will work with any bank - but this can come with additional costs. Sometimes this can be a too heavy a burden for some small businesses. As we have mentioned, TOPS© already interfaces with the Royal Bank of Scotland WorldPay service. The online version of TOPS© also uses ServeBase to provide the actual processing of credit cards. This allows clients to then have the monies collected from credit cards to be paid into ANY existing merchant account that they have with ANY bank. There is a facility fee to pay to add the service within TOPS© which is currently £175 and thereafter a mere 10p per transaction - for example if you processed 1000 transactions in a year and they averaged say £60 each it would only cost you £100 for the year - in addition to your existing merchant facility costs, of course. These costs are subject to revision.