Fat Zebra Gateway

Fat Zebra is an Australian-based online payment services company with an unusual name and some attractive options for small businesses looking to take credit card payments online.

They offer three payment plans, starting with the Solo plan for $220 per year, with no monthly fee and a transaction charge of 40 cents (Aus), but if their plans don’t cover exactly what you need, then they do have the option to contact them for an exact quote. They support American Express, MasterCard, Visa and JCB, with Tier 1 PCI DSS certification to demonstrate their security levels.

You also get access to their additional Fraud Protection service and everything is controlled by an ‘intelligent’ dashboard to keep you in charge.

Payments are made via Fat Zebra servers which are located in a secure data centre in Canberra, Australia, and they provide details of all the steps necessary for any staff to gain access, and the encryption they use to safeguard customer data (Passwords are stored as a non-reversible hash, and credit card data uses asymmetric encryption – for those interested, you can see more details on the Fat Zebra website)

What all that means is that Fat Zebra could be a very good choice for online payment services, particularly for eCommerce businesses based in the southern hemisphere. You’ll need an Internet Merchant Account with your bank, but sign-up is a simple online registration and you can be up and running within 24 hours to provide one-off or recurring online payments.