We used Setcom/MonsterPay and sorry to say but for us, it sucked, I cancelled in the end. (We then tried AlertPay and it sucked even worse, do NOT bother with AlertPay; I'm now using one of the Digital River companies, though too early to tell, so far it seems much more promising on the whole.) I had a lot of problems with credit cards being declined on Setcom/MonsterPay, particularly foreign cards (most my customers are overseas). Customers would be asked ridiculous things like that they had to go to their bank to authorize the transaction --- Setcom seemed to think this was a perfectly normal response --- as if customers are going to go into a bank just for a little $10 online software purchase or something. They never gave me a reasonable explanation why so many transactions were declined; my suspicion is that many foreign banks automatically block African merchants for fraud prevention reasons. Anyway, on another note, their automatic notification system was very buggy, and I sent multiple support queries about it over a period of months and they ignored most of them, and still never fixed the problems with the notification system. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back, I had a US customer, known to us as a valid customer, order about $500 worth of software from us a few months ago. Order went through OK, fine. Except after the order was completed, Setcom/MonsterPay starts sending my customer nagging e-mails stating he has to 'verify his credit card', with a link to an online verification system --- that *didn't work*. WTF. Customer tried multiple times to 'verify' their card, kept getting a 'not working, try again later' message, and kept getting the nagging emails. And I didn't even know about any of this until after about a month of this when my exasperated, frustrated angry customer emails us about it. I phone Setcom, and they confirm that indeed their credit card verification system is broken. I was like 'wtf', how can you harass my customer to 'verify their credit card' and keep sending him to a *broken system*? No answer. Is this bizarro-land? Then it gets worse: They then suggest that in order to verify the credit card, they will ask the customer to fax his credit card statements to them instead. What!? He must fax his credit card statements just for ordering some software online!? I went beserk and told them there was no way I would let them harass my customer to do that. Setcom seem unable to see the inanity of this ... they insisted that somehow this seemed perfectly normal to them, and told me that they would always require this 'verification' for any order of $500 or more (because it's 'such a high amount'). Now I'm sorry, I've ordered things many times online before, including for over $500, and I've never in my life had to do anything anywhere near as ridiculous as anything like that, in fact with the exception of Dell, anything I've tried to order online has always "just worked", no mess no fuss, and that's how it should be --- why should I expect my customers to go through that? No way my customers will put up with it, I'll just lose my customers. I had to apologise *profusely* to my poor customer and try explain all this. Setcom seems to be stuck in this old apartheid "papers please" mentality where they think it's normal to push customers to do stupid pointless bureaucratic paper-pushing. Now the average South African customer might be used to putting up with this sort of crap, because of the old days, and because we put up with crap like FICA, and because we're used to stuff that doesn't work, and we're used to e.g. being pushed around and sent to banks and asked to fulfil stupid bureaucratic requirements just to buy something online, but most of my customers are overseas and there is no way in hell they would ever put up with crap like that. I told Setcom they'd better drop this issue, and that this will be the last time because I was stopping my service with them.
My impression was also that they have lots of little technical problems with the system, and that they simply don't have the resources i.e. skilled programmers to fix them, or else aren't interested in fixing them.
Setcom/Monsterpay also requires a 'registration process' for the customer, having to 'verify their credit card' before they can even buy --- obviously this pushes customers away --- rule one of selling anything, don't put obstacles in front of a customer who wants to pay. Anyway, the Digital River products have a much more sophisticated shopping cart (with e.g. multilingual support (so users can use the shopping cart 'in their own language') and much fancier multiple currency support (users see prices in their own currency by default, and it uses automatic country detection)), and they also have many more features, e.g. the ability to set up reseller and affiliate accounts (so you can manage a list of other accounts of people who can sell your products at a commission). We're currently trying Share-It. They also have many more payment options and help sort out the payments, especially for overseas customers. It hasn't been perfect, but so far their support has always been responsive to my requests (Share-It I mean). They handle South African merchants, and they have no stupid limits like $500 (it's more like $10,000 --- I asked). They have a range of companies/services offering 'similar but different' products, e.g. eSellerate, regnow. Share-It has no monthly charge, but their per-transaction percentage is higher than Setcom's --- personally, I think it is absolutely worth paying the slightly higher commission for a far better product. They do seem to focus on software specifically though, so I'm not sure what your product is. Also, many of my issues may be more because we focus on international software sales .... if most of your customers are South African, you might have fewer issues with Setcom, I don't know. Personally I won't touch them again. Your mileage might vary, I don't know ... doesn't really hurt for you to try them out I suppose.
Note when I was with them they also (if I recall correctly) did not handle PayPal, which was another item on the 'sucks' list ... I don't know if this has changed though since FNB and PayPal made their arrangement.
