It's staggering to me that these companies are clipping the ticket for 2-3% for ALL credit card based commerce in the world. That's a lot of money.
When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#72Amazon Payments is often overlooked as a fine alternative to Paypal, for those who have had issues with Paypal's... inethical business practices. Moxie Marlinspike uses it to accept donations for example.
Is Google Checkout any good?
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#73Hmm... So if I want to have $0.99 payments, it will cost me 32% to go with paypal or 26% to go with setting up my own merchant account, and both are only for domestic payments. Suddenly Apple's 30% for payments from ~100 countries sounds like a bargain.
PayPal has micropayments. 5%+$.05 fee, so it'd be ten cents to process your .99 example. I haven't figured out how to actually get these rates yet, but I've just started looking into micropayments options, and PayPal looks like one of the best.
Those are only domestic. If you want international, though still not as many countries as Apple, it would be 3.9% + $0.30 or thirty-four cents on the .99 example.
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
PayPal has micropayments. 5%+$.05 fee, so it'd be ten cents to process your .99 example. I haven't figured out how to actually get these rates yet, but I've just started looking into micropayments options, and PayPal looks like one of the best.
Those are only domestic. If you want international, though still not as many countries as Apple, it would be 3.9% + $0.30 or thirty-four cents on the .99 example.
According to the PayPal website:
"PayPal offers support for Micropayments to merchants for US to US, GB to GB, AU to AU, and EU to EU transactions for Business and Premier accounts. This feature is offered at a special rate of 5% + $0.05 per transaction."
Then, there is a currency conversion fee of 2.5% and a cross-border fee of 1% for payments from outside your country and currency. So, total for a foreign currency payment would be 8.5%+.05, if I'm reading it right.
Dramatically cheaper than Apple.
You can see all that here:
https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/
Though the popups and menus don't work in Chrome, making it impossible to see all this information. Firefox 4 works fine, though.
Anyway, it appears impossible to revert to the standard rates/fees structure with PayPal micropayments.
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
SwellJoe - you were paying way too much for your merchant account... Unfortunately, that's sort of standard practice for credit card processors, even ones that we've seen people recommend on HN. We've got it in our contracts with http://FeeFighters.com processors that they can NEVER raise pricing, don't have any hidden fees, and we have reviews on them so you can see how other people have liked them. I don't know eno…
"you were paying way too much for your merchant account..." Yeah, I know. That's why we switched to PayPal. The rates started out great (I think it was 2.1% when we started). Then they climbed every few months to being ridiculously expensive; they'd labeled our business "high risk", or something, somewhere along the way (despite the fact that all of the problems were because their fraud protection mechanisms were non…
We (Braintree) don't require fax usage. It's an option but not a requirement.
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do get back to us in about 6 months to let us know how your merchant account is performing in regard to chargebacks. In my experience, we never win with our merchant bank, yet almost always win with PayPal.
What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds? If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he tal…
Or consider a service. Suppose you're ODesk or eLance--do you offer a money back guarantee months later after you've paid a contractor for their work?
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#77Square. Square. Square... Did I mention Square? http://www.sqaureup.com My life is much easier for sure. No Paypal Bulls*it.
Dude that site looks like a click fraud scam.
Because the link is actually http://www.squareup.com/
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
"you were paying way too much for your merchant account..." Yeah, I know. That's why we switched to PayPal. The rates started out great (I think it was 2.1% when we started). Then they climbed every few months to being ridiculously expensive; they'd labeled our business "high risk", or something, somewhere along the way (despite the fact that all of the problems were because their fraud protection mechanisms were non…
We (Braintree) don't require fax usage. It's an option but not a requirement.
Someone, maybe you, mentioned in a prior conversation here at HN that fax or mail was required during setup. Has that changed?
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds? If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he tal…
"If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he talked about running 4 years straight with zero chargebacks using a policy like that." This is a fairy story. We have a no questions asked 60 day full refund policy. We have at least one cha…
Here's a link to the fairy story in question:
Re: When to Use PayPal vs. Merchant Account
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds? If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he tal…
It's all about where the customer enters the process. If they are using the software and say, "Hey I think this sucks" then they will likely go to your site and request a refund. If, however, they look at their credit card statement and think, "I didn't like that program, I meant to cancel it" or "Hey I don't remember buying anything from ABC Software" (because the name of your product is "Really Cool Thing Pro") the…
That's one of the "broken process" things I had in mind when I wrote the above. The text that appears on your customers' credit card statement should clearly identify:
- what they actually bought
- how to contact you
There are a dozen little things you can do to reinforce the message that "we don't want your money unless you're amazingly happy". If your customer wants his money back, he'll get it one way or another. If you make it easy to simply reverse the transaction through you, they won't ever need to get their bank involved.