Merchant/paypal services

[sws]

Hi,

I've got a question regarding accepting credit card payments online.

I am wondering if anybody knows a way of doing this without having to go through one of the big banks for a gateway.

I know paypal offers it but it is only for US residents. I live in Canada.

Does anybody know how I can accept credit cards without having to have my credit approved and paying all kinds of heavy set up fees like the banks charge.

I do currently accept paypal as my only method of payment but a lot of my clientelle is elderly and very hesitant to use paypal.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Ninjakreborn]

I am obsessed with custom programming, I do 70-90% of everythign I do 100% custom from scratch, but after lot's of thinking, I know of one function that is universal, that validates teh credit card number, but to actual be able to do the physical processing, it's best to use a service, unless you want to do them all manually.
Plus there are lot's of legal concerns related to storing credit card number's, and other related information in a local database.
I was told this by someone here on phpfreaks, and when I checked it, you can get severe suit damages if someone hacked your database, you need a top of the line secure system to be able to do something like that, which is above that of even small businesses, that would be something for huge, mega million dollar businesses.  Paypal would be a good alternative, because people can use there credit cards/debit cards (through) the paypal system if they wanted.

[sws]

Yeah, I use paypal now. And it's great but I find that a lot of customers don't want to use it. I don't know why (probably because it's an extra step, setting up the paypal account)

I wasn't suggesting I create something myself. 

I was wondering if there are any companies out there that offer something like paypal web payments PRO (U.S. residents only) This lets them pay with their credit card without having to set up a paypal account (I think)

I would use that solution but I live in Canada so they wont let me.

[Ninjakreborn]

do some googling for alternatives, something like
"paypal web payments PRO alternatives"
"paypal web payments PRO canada alternatives"
"paypal web payments PRO canadian services"
things like that, see what kind of things you can uncover by doing some studying on it, find out what the general name for that "type" of service is, and see if you can uncover some canadian alternatives, that are free, and open source, you never know what you can find, by doing a little digging.
Sometimes the best site's aren't number one in google, and it work's if you sometime's go to the 50-100th page, sometimes you find stuff that work's better than the first couple of pages.  Maybe one's just starting out, with not a lot of ranking's or traffic.