Hi all. We recently switched over from turbo lister to auctiva to handle our auction building needs. Boy what an improvement! We have been so happy with auctiva. Currently, we accept paypal and have for 5 years. However, as you can imagine, we like so many others are getting fed up with paying paypal thousands of dollars a year in fees, and then getting beat on every sort of buyer scam in the book. We have decided to give a merchant account a try. Please keep in mind that we sell about a million dollars a year on ebay on 4 different accounts, so we need something reliable. That is why I wanted some opinions here in the forums. I have read some horror stories here about auctiva's checkout system not working properly, but that appears to be old news. I hope to switch over to auctiva checkout and take paypal out of our listings. I just have a couple questions:

1: I know we have to use authorize.net to get the integration, but do we also need a merchant account in addition to using authorize.net to get paid? I did a search and found conflicting information on the boards about this.

2: If you need both a merchant account and authorize.net for it to work, can anyone recommend some good choices to go with? We need reliability and trust as we take in a huge amount of money each month for ebay payments.

3: With the auctiva checkout, how do you get notified as the seller when someone pays? Do you get an email from auctiva stating someone has paid for the item and does the email contain all the info you need like the auction title, ebay item #, and the buyers name and address? If not, does that email come from the merchant account processor instead? I'm hoping we get an automatic email from somewhere just like we do with paypal that tells you someone has paid and all the pertinent information to ship the item.

Thanks in advance for all your advice!

One other quick question:
I see auctiva is an authorized reseller of authorize.net Do I have to purchase the authorize.net from auctiva, or can i use another merchant account that has authorize.net and still have it automated through auctiva checkout. The reason I ask is because of the listed fees. Auctiva lists a $149 setup fee, $20 monthly gateway, and 10 cents per transaction. They then charge 2.39% plus 25 cents per transaction. This is higher than we currently pay per transaction with paypal (2.2%). However, there are other merchant account processors out there like auctioncheckout.com that have lower per transaction fees as well as free setup. I'd love to dump paypal and give all my business to auctiva, but we do a lot of business on ebay and this would be a significant increase in the amount of fees paid to receive payments. Thanks.

Yes, you need a Merchant Account. All Auth.net does is process the transaction online and send it to the Merchant account for risk assessment and payment of the funds to you. Most Merchant accounts will include the Gateway (auth.net).

No, you can get your Auth.net gateway from anywhere and use it on Auctiva.