Shopping Cart solutions, high transaction costs?

[Gulfsailor]

Hi all,

Intersted in setting up a webshop type business with local delivery of certain goods. I checked several shopping cart solutions and it seems that Shopify offers exactly what I need in conjunction with some 3rd party apps for it. Total cost around 1500 baht per month, so that is very doable.

Some customers might prefer to pay COD (cash on delivery), but others I am sure in our case would prefer to use a credit card payment option when ordering. The transaction fees then get quite high. Shopify charges 2% and the only payment gateway listed for Thailand then also charges 5.5% and a small fixed fee. So total cost of offering card payment is over 7.5% and there is also a loss on currency conversion apparently.

Are there any cheaper solutions out there? A problem is that 95% of the customers would be non locals, meaning their billing address would be different than the shipping address. I worry that using PayPal or such would cause many problems in regards to fraud protection. Also PayPal charges 2.9% plus some other fees and possibly cross border fees.

Any people running a webshop in Thailand accepting foreign credit cards without problems at a cost acceptable way?

Thanks!

[IMHO]

Read their policies regarding chargebacks - if 7.5% includes some type of insurance/protection against chargebacks, it's mega-cheap.

PayPal actually gets very competitive, even against the best merchant accounts, once you hit reasonable transaction volumes and/or if you actually talk to them and negotiate. Don't just sign up using their website - talk to them - that way you get assigned an actual (human) account manager, and most of the issues you've heard about with using PayPal as a seller just disappear.