Over the past six months, I’ve seen a growing number of clients who use Intuit Merchant Service (also known as QuickBooks® Merchant Service) to process credit card payments. Why this increase is a topic for another blog post. However, a constant question that I get from customers is: “How can I connect my Intuit Merchant Account with my online store?” In this blog post, I’ll provide an answer that will help those using Intuit Merchant Services and those considering it for their online store payment processing.
Let’s get some basics out of the way. In order to process payments online, you’ll need 2 key things: (1) a merchant account that is capable of accepting credit card payments, and (2) a payment gateway that provides a secure mechanism to connect your online store to your merchant account.
The key benefit of Intuit Payment Solutions is its tight integration with QuickBooks. Not only can Intuit Merchant Service securely process credit card payments, but it also synchronizes the transactions with QuickBooks. This makes it really easy to download deposit information and processing fees, reconcile accounts, and match income and expense transactions.
Moreover, Intuit Payment Solutions provides several channels to process customer credit cards: Mobile, Computer, Web Store or a Terminal. To accept payments on your online store, you’ll need to set up an account with Intuit Merchant Service for Web Stores. And for an additional $9.95 per month, you can add the Web Store processing capability to an existing Computer or Terminal Intuit Merchant service account. Once you’ve signed up, Intuit provides all the instructions and software to connect your online store with your account. Unfortunately, it only works with a small number of shopping carts, such as Homestead, Go Daddy, Web.com, and a few others.
If your shopping cart is incompatible with Intuit Merchant Service, there are 3 ways to circumvent the issue:
- Custom programming – Hire a web developer to write a custom payment gateway integration program to connect Intuit Merchant Services for Web Stores with your shopping cart. This isn’t a simple task, as there are no reliable off-the-shelf scripts to use and Intuit requires an extensive process to writing a custom integration. For more information, refer to Intuit’s Quick Reference guide for integrating with QuickBooks Merchant Service: http://qbms.developer.intuit.com/sdk/qbms/Get_Oriented/Quick_Reference_Guide
- Get a different merchant account: If option 1 isn’t viable, you could get a secondary merchant account and payment gateway with a different payment gateway provider. First, check your shopping cart developer’s compatibility list to see which gateways are supported. Your best bet would be Authorize.net, which has an extensive list of compatible shopping carts: http://www.authorize.net/solutions/merchantsolutions/merchantservices/certifiedsolutiondirectory/. Then contact your preferred bank or merchant account broker to set up a new merchant account with the selected gateway. The only drawback here is the lack of QuickBooks integration, but a third-party application, such as eCC, can integrate with various shopping cart platforms to download all the income-related information into QuickBooks seamlessly.
- Move to a compatible cart: This is probably my least favorite but if all else fails, move your shopping cart to one of the carts supported by Intuit Merchant Service.
Side note:
Innovative Gateway Solutions (www.innovativegateway.com) is an Intuit company that offers a separate merchant account and payment processing gateway. However, it does not integrate with QuickBooks; so even though it’s an Intuit company, you don’t get many of the integration benefits as with Intuit Merchant Solutions.
Although Intuit Payment Solutions offers a smooth and easy mechanism to accept online credit card payments, it is limited by the number of compatible shopping cart platforms. However, there are alternative ways to accept credit cards with your online store and third party integration applications can help you reconcile your accounts without manual effort.
Great feedback and questions. I understand your position and can see the gap here…let me try to address each item:
1) Why don’t I recommend offline – because it means you need to store customer’s credit card information and/or wait to process payments later on.
2) Why we offer offline payments – as an option for companies that use eCC for phone-orders primarily or where charging the card upfront during checkout doesn’t make sense
3) The missing gap in the reconciliation process – If you use PayPal, eCC currently doesn’t track the expenses associated with the account so although you can capture the sales from your site, you don’t have the reconciled expenses/fees in QB..those have to be entered manually. I understand this can be tedious but its something we do plan to automate in eCC with future releases. In fact we already do provide expenses tracking for eBay and Amazon …we’ll do so for PayPal as well soon (2-3 months).
4) Choosing between offline and PayPal really boils down to a question of time. Webgility uses PayPal as well and I find it to be less time-consuming to get the total expenses for a month and enter those as a single entry into QB. If I want to track expenses for each transaction then probably not the best option.
Hope that addresses everything.
Cheers,
Parag
If your online store processes payment using a different provider, you don’t need Intuit Merchant Services for your online store. You can continue to use that processor for your store transactions only.
what if i already have a merchant services provider that will process all my transactions needs? do i still need to hire a developer to write a custom payment integration?
I think ecc is amazing! so here is my struggle I don’t mind doing the offline payment hassle, but my goal is to make data entry and synchronization as seamless as possible. It seems like any which way i try to compromise with this i’m screwed. If i switch to paypal, or any of the others then they don’t link up with quickbooks in a way that works easily (maybee i’m wrong here) but best I can tell it’s a lot of checks and balances i have to do manually to confirm their payment posted and to post the transaction fees etc. As much as I hate QBMS for their lack of knowledge and help earlier this year when i was a victim of a scam that they could have stopped they seem to have the market cornered on being the only ones to allow integration with quickbooks. So now the only other option i can see is to use the offline payment function you seem to have but i’m SUPER worried about why your telling us not to use something that you built? how can we safely use this feature and why specifically do you not recommend using it. What are your other customers using quick-books for accounting, and virtue-mart for their hosting using.
You’re welcome to link to our blog posting.
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Thank you for the compliments; however, we don’t specialize in web design. We do focus on eCommerce integration solutions for online merchants, which includes online payment processors.
Informative information and excellent posts you have!
- Abbey BYRNES
Thanks for this. If you are on Drupal and using Ubercart, you can use also use a free gateway (http://www.ubercart.org/project/uc_qbms) to connect to your Intuit Merchant Account. ECC also seems like an extremely important piece because it handles the sync. We tried using Homestead (an Intuit company) and although they tried very hard, they could not get Homestead to sync with QuickBooks (a new QuickBooks file is no problem; an established company with years of data in QuickBooks is, according to their level 2 support, a very difficult thing to successfully sync).
I did option #2 just yesterday because I had the same question. We just changed merchant accounts in our retail store and I asked our rep if he we could set up our online store using his merchant service. He said we just need a payment gateway. I pulled up my admin page in osCommerce and authorize.net was the first one on the list. His tech guy said that would be a great choice, so we’re on our way. I appreciate your blog post to confirm I did the right thing!