Hey all. We're going to start selling a lot of $2 and $3 products soon. They are downloads so there isn't any shipping. If someone orders just one download their order total is so low that it starts to become non-economical to process credit cards through our merchant account (as we're paying $0.30 + 3%). I'm wondering what people here do for micropayments. Paypal is one option and their charges are pretty reasonable ($0.05 + 5%). I'm just wondering if there's anything else we should be looking at? Thanks!
Paypal is the only 3rd party processor I know of that does something like this. I broke it down and most merchant providers should be able to set you up with the same 5% +$.05, its just a matter of whether they want to take the time to do so. The other difference is that with the merchant provider you will most likely have a monthly statement fee, and a monthly gateway fee (Authorize.net, Verisign, etc.) and possibly a few other fees. What is it that you are selling for $2 or $3?
Downloads (audio, video, etc.) Paypal probably is our best (only?) option from what I've seen. Which is fine as I think it will work pretty well. My understanding is that we'll probably need to set up two accounts: one for larger transactions and one for smaller (sub-$5) transactions) and then have our shopping cart pick the best account to use based on the transaction size. I don't think that Paypal will auto-determine that for us...