What to look for in a Bermuda payment gateway

There is not much of a shortlist to work through here. Most Bermuda banks settle through Authorize.Net, so the useful work is in understanding what you are being charged for and by whom. Here is what to check before you sign anything.

Start by separating three different bills

A Bermuda business taking card payments online is paying up to three separate parties, and conflating them is where most confusion about “payment processing fees” comes from:

The gateway provider (Authorize.Net, in practice, since it is the gateway most Bermuda banks already work with) charges a flat fee for authorising and routing transactions: currently around $25 a month, 10 cents per transaction, and a 10 cent daily batch fee. No setup fee, no early-termination fee, as of this writing.

Your bank sets its own merchant account and card-processing rates separately. This is usually the largest and most variable of the three costs, and it is set by your bank, not by the gateway.

Whoever builds or configures your payment page charges for that work once, either building a payment page from scratch or configuring the gateway on a site you already have. This is a one-time cost, not a recurring one, unless you are paying for an ongoing managed service on top of it.

A quote that only mentions one of these three is not a complete picture of what you will actually pay.

Questions worth asking before you commit

Does the setup require access to my existing website? It often does not need to. If a provider asks for your website login to configure a gateway, ask why, since gateway configuration is usually possible without it.

Is there a monthly fee beyond the gateway’s own charge? Some setups add a markup on top of Authorize.Net’s own $25, some do not. Knowing which you are being quoted matters for comparing two numbers fairly.

What happens if a transaction is disputed? Chargebacks and disputes are handled between your bank and the card networks, not the gateway configuration, but whoever set up your fraud filters affects how often disputes happen in the first place.

Who do I call when something fails? A transaction silently failing at 9pm on a Saturday is a different problem depending on whether “support” means a Bermuda phone number or a ticket queue in another time zone.

The security side, once you are live

The settings that limit fraud and account takeovers, one login per employee, fraud filters set to decline rather than monitor, access cut the same day somebody leaves, are commonly left as the account came. The Authorize.Net security checklist covers the ones worth checking, ranked by how urgently each one matters.

Getting set up

There are three routes, from opening the account yourself to having a payment page built, and they are laid out with what each involves in how to accept credit card payments in Bermuda. Current pricing for each is on dot.bm’s payments page.

Whichever route fits, the fee structure behind it does not change. Authorize.Net’s charges are fixed and published, your bank’s rates are separate and worth confirming with the bank, and the one-time cost depends on how much building the payment page takes.