What is the downside to using a third party payment processor?
While third party payment processors are a wonderful way to increase sales, there may be some negative issues associated with their use. First, you may be charged a higher transaction or percentage fee for the sales made through third party payment processors. This is not always the case, though. Indeed, Google Checkout is offering free payment processing to all merchants through the end of 2007. Secondly, with many third party payment processors, you are not given the full information about the customer who is making the purchase. This can make it more difficult to follow up with the customer, as well as offering future marketing benfits such as e-newsletters and special previous customer coupons or discounts. Finally, if you are using a third party analytics product, you may be limited in the available data provided by the third party payment processor. For example, if your analytics product requires that custom HTML be rendered on the customer receipt, you will be unable to apply th
