Accepting payments online

I don't know if every business is like this, please tell me. From what seemed like a simple concept, there are a million and one things to think about. Everyday new things to do pop up from nowhere, which means the stuff that I was doing before gets put on hold. Nothing ever seems to get done. It's a management nightmare.

We're setting up an e-commerce business of sorts and everyday there seems to be a new cost associated with the functioning of the system. After two weeks of speaking to various sales people on the phone is it that I have begun to understand the flow of accepting payments online. Rather than host a secure server ourselves, we will use a payment processing firm who charge per transaction. They handle all security, fraud checks, etc., and take payments from a customer's credit / debit card and forward it into our merchant account. The payment processing firm, Protx, charge 10p + VAT per transaction and forward the money to our account each day at 2am. It takes up to 3 days for the money to arrive in our merchant account. Upon arrival in our account, the bank take a percentage (somewhere between 2.5% and 5% depending on the bank) and some also charge a transaction fee of £0.50 - £1.00. Any money we collect, we must forward to our clients minus our commission. So the next payment flow is from our bank account to our clients' bank accounts. We will do this via the BACS system which takes around 3 business days, and depending on the type of business account, you can do for free.

It certainly pays to shop around for business bank accounts. Remember, banks want your business, and this is proven by the fact that they all offer deals to business start-ups. Some are better than others of course. We've been to a few of the high street banks and most helpful were Lloyds TSB (they gave us a free book called Lloyds TSB Small Business Guide) and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Re-starting the business plan

I thought of the idea for the business back in January 2005. During my masters I took a module on Enterprise and my group needed an idea. We got a pretty good mark for the plan and its presentation to a scary bunch of business gurus and we entered the plan into a business competition run by the universities in the north east. We made the final but had to drop out because people were either too busy with other coursework or were not fully committed to the idea. Over the course of the year my housemate persuaded me to consider going into business for real. Suffice to say we are both now working on the idea pretty much full-time.