Realex Payments, the leading Irish web payments processor, have been very busy the past few weeks. They were the headline sponsor for the IIA 2009 Congress on May 21st where they launched a new website onlinepayments.ie. The site promotes the concept of building an online payment strategy for your business. On June 9th Realex announced that they signed a five year deal with Virgin Atlantic to provide a payment solution for Virgin Atlantic customers worldwide. Later in the same week Realex relaunched their corporate website www.realexpayments.com, including lots of new useful information for businesses starting to take payments online.

Highlights include:

• 5 steps to selling online - details 5 steps to accepting online payments on your website with Realex.
• Merchant services agreement -  provides contact details for acquiring banks and card schemes that Realex work with.
• Fraud Management - gives details of the fraud management tools provided by Realex.
• Checklist for working with Realex Payments - a list of 9 items that must be in place before you can accept online payments with Realex.

Earlier this year we reported that SagePay, a Realex competitor, were entering the Irish Market. SagePay introduced the SagePay Go package. The service costs €25 per month for up to 1000 transactions per quarter with additional transactions charged at 15c each. The package includes CVN, fraud prevention tools and 3D secure. This was the first service of its kind in Ireland to have transparent pricing, no set-up fees and 24/7 support.

Realex Payments, in swift response have introduced a new package called RealPay. The new package costs €29 per month, includes 350 transactions per month (equating to 1050 per quarter) with additional transactions charged at 19c each. The new package does not have any setup fee and includes CVN, fraud scoring and 3D secure at no extra cost. Full details of the RealPay package are available on the revamped Realex Payments website.

This is great news for small businesses and start-up companies wanting to accept online payments in Ireland. The new pricing plans offered by both providers have significantly reduced the barrier to entry for accepting online payments in Ireland. Payment processing services for Irish SME's are now easier to see at a glance and this will act as an enabled for the web-based sales channel. This is very encouraging for anyone wanting to start an online business in Ireland. Comparing the annual cost of either the SagePay or RealPay package, both will come in at less than €350 which is similar to the annual cost of a broadband service or IIA SME Membership.

The last remaining hurdle in accepting payments online as an Irish business is getting an Internet Merchant Account and managing the associated costs, which we will explore in an upcoming blog post, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of our blog.

Dave

Related posts:

• Realex Payments Launch Online Payments Website at IIA Congress
• UK Payments Service Provider to enter Irish Market

Today at the IIA Congress Realex Payments launched www.onlinepayments.ie, the newest addition to their already impressive portfolio of websites. They have taken a similar approach to webpayments.ie even including a flash animation to explain the steps involved in a credit card authorisation. The site provides a useful overview of Multi Channel Payments, Payment Methods, Currency Management, Fraud Management, Reporting & Compliance which will no doubt be expanded upon and developed as the site matures.

From what I gather, www.onlinepayments.ie is wholly developed and maintained by Realex Payments, and is branded in a similar manner. I am glad they are upfront and honest about this and applaud their honesty in this regard. The site is impressively designed the content is useful and kudos to Digitalounge having done a great job on the design.

There are a few errors on the site but I am sure they are just teething issues with will be resolved soon. Overall it is a well put together resource that looks well and providers useful information.

There is a lack of freely available information in the area of online payments specifically related to the Irish Market. WebPayments.ie seeks to continually provide a solution to this. We publish independent, quality information on everything from payments service provider options, quality of service and reputation to the customer experience on your site. It is great to finally have a site to compare webpayments to and to help us up our game. Competition is good as we always say on webpayments.ie, so we would like to formally welcome this new resource to the web and we wish them the best with their efforts.

 

Dave

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Related Blog Posts:

•  More businesses go online - Realex report record online payment signups
•  Realex Payments launch RealPay package for Irish SME's.