Say you’re running an online store, selling something digital or physical.
Is it practical to completely avoid the fees of payment processing companies like Stripe?
Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#2There is something called a merchant account that might be suitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account. I'm sure there are some fees associated with it but you should look into it and see if it will fit your use cases.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#3Handle payments yourself. And unless you have massive sales, those fees are cheaper and easier to maintain
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#4How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way.
In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant.
You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't add the right invoice number, for example).
PayPal or similar also have their fees.
Using crypto for payment is possible, but the wild swings in price means that this is a highly unstable option. There are fees there as well (0.5 USD - 1 USD), and the time to close a transaction is a lot (10 minutes, IIRC).
It is also making things like taxes a pain. And that is where you start to get into really "fascinating" territory.
A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#5Yes, make your customers mail you a check or cash /s
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#6Add in-store pickups and accept cash payments.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#7But applicable for most countries outside of India, but UPI has no MDR.
But it does have a 60k inr daily limit.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#8You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening.
It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic.
Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#9Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto.
Easy weekend project.
Re: Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?
#10You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening. It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic. Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.
Stripe and any number of the new fintech companies make card payments an absolute pleasure compared with the drama of getting merchant accounts, leasing a PDQ etc.
We run an SME (a boarding kennel, so nothing exactly cutting edge) and Square costs us 1.75% for cardholder present transactions. No minimum charge, cash is in the next working day, they do all the compliance so provided I don't do anything mental like taking pictures of payment cards, I'm sorted.
Obviously there's a higher cost for online processing and you could probably bring down the percentage cost if you shop around, but the ease of entry for card payments these days is absolutely astonishing.
The biggest problem with crypto is that you, as a business owner, want to make it as easy as possible for people to give you their money and crypto is a massive frction unless you're marketing to the tiny subset of people using it as a currency rather than a value store. It'd be a bit like accepting gold over the counter.