Ecommerce Exchange software is a merchant account program to run credit card orders and print electronic checks. Ecommerce Exchange costs about $300, but there’s one place who gives PC-Charge free with a merchant account sign up or switching to them. I’ve owned PC-Charge for years and like it a lot better (especially when it’s free).

There’s many programs like Ecommerce exchange to turn your computer into a virtual terminal instead of using a real credit card terminal like the ones from Verifone, Nurit, and others that you see in stores.

What are the advantages to a merchant account with software like Ecommerce Exchange? This is really for mail order or low volume Internet transactions. If you do a lot of them online then a gateway and shopping cart is much more efficient.

With a merchant account you can get swipe (card present) rates of %1.47 and Internet rates of %1.95 which is about fifty percent less than Paypal and about 1/4 of what 2checkout gives you. Also the transaction rate of 8 cents is much lower (Paypal is 30 cents).

Paypal is free to sign up with so it makes for a nice option since some people really only want to pay that way, so I would get an account with them and leave it as an option. Some people have a lot of money in their Paypal accounts and want to spend that instead.

Totally forget about printing online checks, either 2checkout or Paypal will let them pay with their bank accounts and it’s much less hassle to let them do it. Just be sure not to ship anything until their online check has cleared with either system or you’ll be stuck with a loss.