The Membership Management System is equipped to handle online payments for new member dues, renewal dues, and event registration fees. This is accomplished through using different payment gateways that allow you to connect your MMS account with a credit card merchant account. Although the topic of payment gateways can be a little complex, for our purposes, think of a payment gateway as the 'glue' between the MMS system and your merchant account and/or bank account.

Authorize.net

Authorize.net is a gateway that is very popular and is what Vieth Consulting recommends the most. On the plus side, it is probably the easiest to use of all the gateways (for the end user- the new member or event registrant in this case). However, the costs involved can be prohibitive for some organizations.

To use Authorize.net, you will want to shop for a credit card merchant account that is enabled with Authorize.net. To do this, you may want to consult your bank account provider and see if they have a recommendation on setting up a Authorize.net merchant account or go to the Authorize.net website.

Costs involved will include:

Set-up fees	$0-$300
Monthly Statement Fee	$10-$20/month
Per transaction fee	$.15-$.30
"Discount Rate" (fee based on a % of transaction)	1%-2.5%

You may want to shop around to find an offer that will reflect the nature of your transactions. For example if you have a high volume of low-cost transactions, you may want to look for lower transaction fees. If the opposite, you may want to look for lower discount rates.

Once your vendor has your Authorize.net account set-up, you will want to contact Vieth Consulting to assist you in integration and run a few tests to verify everything is working correctly.

PayPal

For organizations who want to save money and if your transaction volume is low, PayPal is an excellent option.

On the down side, PayPal adds a little more indirection for the end user (the new member or event registrant). They will be leaving the MMS web pages, and be processing their transaction on the paypal website. This can be confusing to some. Also, PayPal will prompt the payor to log-in, and if non-paypal users don't see the "click here if not a member" button, this can cause confusion as well.

But, it is a valid option for many groups who have low-volume transactions.

To set-up PayPal, you will need to create a paypal account for your organization. Ideally, you should set it up with an organization-based email address (treasurer@yourgroup.org). So that if the contact people in the organization change, the email account will not have to change.

The account is free, but is subject to transaction fees. As of this writing, the Standard Rate for paypal was:

Set-up fees	$0
Monthly Statement Fee	$0
Per transaction fee	$.30
(fee based on a % of transaction)	2.9%

To hook-up the paypal account with the MMS, you will be using PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN). When you have your paypal account established, contact Vieth Consulting for procedures on how to set-up your PayPal account with IPN.

LinkPoint

LinkPoint Connect is another method which is supported by Vieth Consulting, although not as often. If you would like to use this method, please contact us for more information.

Other Gateways...

The MMS currently supports three different gateways, and can easily support more.
So, if you want to use a different gateway than one presented here, please contact us.