ClearAccept - A few Notes

[John Ennals]

SellerdeckPay by ClearAccept seems to provide an excellent solution for very small retailers, for whom monthly minimum charges and annual service charges can be hard to swallow. It's a bit like a cross between PayPal and traditional PSP+merchant account solutions. I've been trialling it for the last week and have noted the following points which may be worth sharing:

• There is no fraud scoring traffic light system as there is with Opayo. This is no great loss, as the results produced by the Opayo scoring system are largely nonsense in my experience. However it's a bit ironic that the withdrawal of this feature by Creditcall/NMI in 2021 was a key reason given by Sellerdeck for recommending switching to SD Payments by Opayo.

• Settlement payments to your bank account are net. Transaction fees are already deducted, and are not charged monthly as might be inferred from Sellerdeck's FAQs.

• Unlike SD Payments by Opayo, the Void facility is only available for pre-authorised transactions. Once the transaction has been committed, or if you have the payment method set to "Charge transactions immediately", it is not possible to void the transaction and the Void button is greyed out. Sellerdeck have told me they plan to change this in a future release.

• As with PayPal (since a couple of years ago), if you process a refund to a cardholder, the transaction fees are not refunded to you.

I hope that's useful. I've gone live with ClearAccept this afternoon, so I'm just waiting for somebody to come along and buy something!

John.

[zgap111]

If the fees are taken off...
there's no way (without making additional calculations) to reconcile goods sold via SellerdeckPay against the bank ?

[John Ennals]

All the information required for bank reconciliation is shown in the ClearAccept portal's Funding tab. According to the Sellerdeck FAQs you also receive a monthly statement.

[mje]

John, on the Sellerdeck info page it says the fees are 1.4% + 20p plus VAT - PayPal don't charge any VAT as an exempt "financial service", I assume Sellerdeck Pay is not a "financial service" - so can I ask if there is any VAT element in what you have been charged as yet ?

Reason I ask is it is not ideal from an accounting view point the way PP etc help themselves per transaction, rather than a monthly invoice, but surely has to just add work if there is VAT involved and has to be reconciled per order rather than each month ?

Monthly or even weekly invoicing would be so much more user friendly.

[John Ennals]

Yes, VAT has been applied to fees at transaction level. The FAQs state that a monthly invoice is sent by email, which I presume summarises the transaction totals, fees and VAT for the month. But I don't know, because I haven't received my first one yet.

I have no idea why ClearAccept charges VAT on transaction fees which other providers treat as exempt - that's a question for ClearAccept.

Edit: February invoice now received, and it does show the VAT total for the month.

[Hugh Gibson]

• There is no fraud scoring traffic light system as there is with Opayo.

Fraud scoring is less relevant now that 3DS is in widespread use. The results of the 3DS check are given in the Payments tab of the order, with an explanation in the ClearAccept KB article.

If the 3DS result was Y then liability is shifted to the issuer.

Additionally, ClearAccept have a team proactively looking at transactions to pick up fraud. They will contact you directly if they find something suspicious.

We plan to expose the 3DS status in the order list in a future release.

[Mantra]

[LIST][*]Settlement payments to your bank account are net. Transaction fees are already deducted, and are not charged monthly as might be inferred from Sellerdeck's FAQs.

This complicates reconciliation of transaction invoiced amounts with bank transfers in particular and book keeping generally and introduces another layer of administration.

[Goz]

This complicates reconciliation of transaction invoiced amounts with bank transfers in particular and book keeping generally and introduces another layer of administration.

Absolutely. Which is why I won't be making the move to SDPay from SDPayments - even though I would be saving money on transaction fees. And it's also why I am moving towards no longer using eBay..... it simply takes too long to reconcile their transactions.

[mje]

Our over the counter retail sales we use World Pay - monthly invoice for fees, nice easy to understand itemised invoice, competitive rates - works well for us,

Website - used to use Sellerdeck with WP as the merchant account alongside PP - became clear that customers prefered PP so we switched it to just PP.... I tolerate PP for that reason alone, it is for me a constant battle with their working practises and robotic decision making.

It is a complete faff and so avoidable with a monthly invoice, if only the service providers applied a retailers logic, it would avoid so much work and eliminate most errors. Monthly invoice = 100% accuracy.

[John Ennals]

ClearAccept portal shows settlement batches, similar to Opayo, with transaction totals before and after deduction of transaction charges; plus you get a monthly invoice/statement. So admin-wise it may be more work than WorldPay/Elavon etc. but a bit less work than PayPal.

For a very small business like mine, the cost savings and improved customer journey at checkout makes ClearAccept almost a no-brainer, but for larger businesses the picture may be different.

With Opayo, I did find I was getting failed payments/abandoned baskets because of the horrible screen that appears asking the customer to select the card type before going on to yet another screen to enter their card details. Faced with 3 different flavours of Visa and 2 of Mastercard, they'd quite often select the wrong one by mistake, only to have their card number rejected on the next screen because it didn't match.

[PaulKelly]

I have a couple of questions which are important to me as I have recently gone through the painful experience of switching payment gateway providers and payment acquirers.

Is it possible for Sellerdeck to publish a true pricing comparison between the new ClearAccept (SellerDeckPay) and the current Opayo Pay.?
Is it correct that the ClearAccept method acts as both the payment gateway and the payment acquirer thereby removing the need for say WorldPay as an acquirer which adds another layer of costs. ?
Also does the new ClearAccept offer a PayByLink option so account customers, particularly overseas customers can pay invoices without using the Web Shop but enter a dedicated secure page to make card payments.?

Paul Kelly
www.sportique.co.uk

[guccij]

I wasn't able successfully to get Sellerdeck Pay up and running, despite having the necessary Secret Keys and v 18.2. It broke the site and I had to uninstall and revert. If anyone on here would like to do the upgrade for me, please get in touch.

[Hugh Gibson]

I've had confirmation from ClearAccept that:

HMRC deem ClearAccept Ltd’s payments services to be VATable at the standard rate

They have updated the FAQs at https://www.clearaccept.com/faqs

[Hugh Gibson]

I wasn't able successfully to get Sellerdeck Pay up and running, despite having the necessary Secret Keys and v 18.2. It broke the site and I had to uninstall and revert. If anyone on here would like to do the upgrade for me, please get in touch.

I can see you're using Swift. Version 18.2.2 should upgrade your site, so please get in touch with support. We'll help you get updated properly. Typically what we do is import your support snapshot, do the upgrade including manual steps where needed, validate that payments can be taken with our test credentials, then give you a Design Elements snapshot that will update your layouts.

We're still working out a few wrinkles regarding automatic upgrades so helping you will help us to get this less painful for others.

[Mantra]

I have a couple of questions which are important to me as I have recently gone through the painful experience of switching payment gateway providers and payment acquirers.

Is it possible for Sellerdeck to publish a true pricing comparison between the new ClearAccept (SellerDeckPay) and the current Opayo Pay.?
Is it correct that the ClearAccept method acts as both the payment gateway and the payment acquirer thereby removing the need for say WorldPay as an acquirer which adds another layer of costs. ?

Paul Kelly
www.sportique.co.uk

Considering your questions, there is a spreadsheet detailing a pricing breakdown for ClearAccept (SellerDeckPay) attached to the post in the link below that I found helpful:
https://community.sellerdeck.com/for...ons#post555877
This should enable you to do a calculation based upon the number and average price per transaction that is processed, for example if you process up to 350 transactions per month of average value per transaction say £20, you can do a price comparison like that shown below:

ClearAccept (SellerDeckPay)
((£84,000 x 1.4% x 1.2) + (4,200 x £0.2 x 1.2)) = £2419 (inc VAT for ClearAccept Transaction & Payment Service)

Sellerdeck Payments by Opayo
((£34 x 12 x 1.2) + (£84,000 x *1.5%) + (12 x **£22)) = £2014 (inc VAT for Sellerdeck Payments by Opayo Service)
* transaction charge rate applied by Merchant Service provider
** monthly charge(s) applied by Merchant Service provider