CC Payment Gateways -- Good and bad?

[lbdesign]

Would anyone like to share advice on which payment gateways are good and which you've had bad experiences with and should be avoided? I need to choose one soon. My two top bids are from Bank of America using CyberSource and Chase using Verisign. This would be for use with a Miva5 store.

There will be periods of high transaction volume, so I particularly want to make sure my gateway does not fail under a heavy transaction load.

Thanks in advance!

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Verisign Payflow Pro/Link and Authorize.Net are pretty good, Linkpoint pretty bad. Cybersource has been good as far as their reliability goes, but their support can be difficult. Cybersource used to be much worse when you had to install a bunch of junk on the server to use them but now you can just use the module built into Merchant without all that mess. Bank of America I'd avoid unless they are bundling it with a gateway that works with Merchant.

[Jimmy Cooper]

Hello,

Based on my past experiences on the MIVA Support team, I can say that both CyberSource and VeriSign have been two of the more stable gateways. We never really got a lot of calls regarding their service being down and such.

They've also both been fairly active with the MIVA Community, having both sponsored and attended the annual MIVA Conference in the past.

[DesignExtend-MSI]

Authorize.net does, however, have a tendency of unscheduled outages that last long periods.

Payflow Pro, in the past few years, has had 2 that I know of, and both were addressed quite quickly (and the partners even notified of the problem).

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

I have not noticed an Authorize.net outage of any significant impact in over 2 years.

When they did the initial migration from v3.0 to v3.1 on their gateway, that was a fiasco...but nothing major since.

Linkpoint on the other hand....has proven to be quite unreliable.

Verisign, while generally a little more pricey, is very stable and fairly easy to work with.

CyberSource, I've had very poor interactions with their support. The gateway itself has been reliable - however wind up with a corrupt .pem file and it could be days before support gets around to figuring it out. Support has been very sketch with answers in the past. I'd expect better from someone who is partnering and bundling a product (MivaPayment).

[ILoveHostasaurus]

We've had a similar experience to Vic, it's been a while since an authnet outage.

With Cybersource, I've found that most problems can be resolved by calling support and asking each person you talk to to expire your certificate, if they can't or won't help, keep asking for managers until you get one who will just listen to you and finally expire the certificate. Then you regenerate one in the module and all is better. It can be a real pain finding someone there that will actually listen to you and just expire the certificate though, they normally want to walk you through checking that java is installed or other useless things that have nothing to do with Merchant's way of talking to them.

[lbdesign]

Thank you all,
This is incredibly helpful information.
best,
--Lee

[Dyna Jim]

I've been on Verisign PFP for almost three years now and it's rock solid for me. I hate the whole gateway/merchant account/wait for the money routine, but I've tried the Payapal Pro setup and it failed miserably. I don't appreciate the select failure bugs in PFP though.

my .02