Credit Card Payments for Malaysian Websites

Accepting payments from website is one of the dream of many business owners.

It can be used for both pre and post payments.

I would prefer pre-payments as there will be less administrative work for billing, follow ups, credit control, etc.

Post-payment is where you issue a bill or invoice to your customer and they can pay later.

There were many questions of how to go about setting up a credit card payment system in our websites.

To make it simple, there are 2 ways of doing this.

First is to apply a merchant account with your local banks that provide online credit card processing services.

The other is to subscribe to third party companies that already have the merchant account and payment gateway linked up.

The initial cost for the first would be much higher as the banks require fixed deposits of MYR 20,000 or more and costs of setting up the systems integration with their payment systems.

Using third party would be more viable as it only requires a setup fee and slightly higher transaction fees. Some may also charge a monthly fees.

A popular third party tool is Paypal. It have extensive support and web system that you can login and manage your transactions, even refunding to your customers, etc.

The only drawback for now is that to retrieve money from Paypal, you either need a US bank account, a VISA debit card, or most would go to Singapore to open a bank account for direct TT from Paypal.

The most convenient way is to apply a VISA debit card from internationally recognized banks and transfer the funds to your card. You can then use it to buy things just like a credit card or withdraw hard cash from ATMs worldwide.

A search from other Malaysian Paypal users revealed that banks such as Public Bank, Citibank and Al-Rajhi VISA debit cards may be usable for Paypal.

An advice from me is, before you start accepting payments from website, ask yourself what is the process flow of your business and how your website can support it throughout until the payment.

The payment is the final process and it shouldn’t take up 90% of your planning. You may want to look at the shopping cart systems, content management systems and others to start with.