Decision Time for me on a new credit card vendor It looks like our business model for use of the site will be $39.95 by purchase order of check. We will discount it for to $24.95 if you pay online with a credit card or by paypal. We have grown from zero to 1.5M visits per month this year. We get around 4K weekly registrations. Once we start charging, we are guessing that the number of registrations will drop to 400/week. At 400/week, $25 each, figure $10K/week. So ~$50K per year. We could be way way off. This would make it my second largest business. I want to use a different credit card vendor this time. PM if you are interested.
Ok, I've been researching. It is very interesting.... my blog on this topic is creditcardsonline101.com Authorize.net - No free schedule online . You need to request a quote. 866-437-0476. When you get them on the phone, they quote: $99 setup and $20/month for authorize.net $10/month and $.25/transaction for the merchant account services provided by Cybersource. Visa/Mastercard rates of 2.19% per transaction for qualified cards, 3.39% for nonqual. Total: assume average rate of 3% plus $.25: $.99 total. BUT, the assumption of an average of 3% is a huge assumption. Sage Payment Systems: No fee schedule on their site. You have to request a quote. (800) 261-0240. I got tired of waiting. 2 Checkout: 5.5% of the transaction total, plus $0.45. For a $24.95 transaction, this would be: $1.82 or 7.2% of my transaction. Paypal: 1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for domestic transactions. This is true for all credit card types. True for debit cards. One operator told me that the rate these days is 2.9%. The next one said that it was tiered. At volumes above $3K/month, I could get 2.7%. 1.9%. It does not depend on volume. Its $1.02. This is around 4%. 866 775-8151. Their service starts with a voice processing system which I found very annoying. I'm now 7 minutes into trying to get them on the phone. And unlike being on hold, it's constant work trying to respond to their voice response system to identify myself. Weird that people still think these systems are useful for customer service. When you create a business account, it can have multiple users. I asked why there is so much on the net about Paypal locking accounts. The answer was a long talk in which Paypal explained that they need to be secure. They could not provide any details on what number of percent of customer complains would trigger "locking" the account but said that I could get that from merchant solutions. Merchant solutions: 888 215 5506. Excessive rate of charge backs is 40%. At above $100K/month, you get an account manager. It's the same for all visa, mastercard, amex, 1% extra on international transactions including Canada: $0.00 USD - $3,000.00 USD - 2.9% + $0.30 USD $3,000.01 USD - $10,000.00 USD - 2.5% + $0.30 USD $10,000.01 USD - $100,000.00 USD - 2.2% + $0.30 USD $100,000.00 USD - 1.9% + $0.30 USD Google Checkout: 2% + $0.20 per transaction (plus the expenses up to 10x of my Adwords fees are deducted from my expenses. Since I spend $4K/month on Adwords, this means that the first $40K of revenue is handled without costs. Since my fee with Google Checkout is 2.8%. This could potentially be absolutely free.
digi1 - thanks for the kudos... I've continued to try to research the Google Checkout option in terms of: - how I qualify for the discount. Does it have to be the same google account or can they be linked? - what are the timeframe issues? For instance, I spent $50K this year on adsense, can I use them as credits against credit card processing fees? How about the $70K last year? - How long can they guarantee these rates for? BTW - I was hoping other people would hop into this discussion and share their research and experiences. I'm a little disappointed. If I don't get some meaningful input here soon, I think I'll return to just keeping notes on my personal credit card blog (creditcardsonline101.com)
Gosh, I just found this old post of mine. Here's how it ended: Google checkout ended their program of giving back your credit card fees against your adwords advertising. I signed up and am using the Paypal merchant account program. It's been absolutely simple and reliable although a tad expensive as our sales get into the hundreds of thousands. Paypal has been up and operational 100% of the time which is better than our other merchant account. The only paypal problem is with their reporting which is a pain.
I see. We are a competitor of PayPal and pride ourselves on merchant protection. We always hear stories from new clients (smaller ones) talking about the pit falls of PayPal's "the consumer is always right" attitude. I was just curious how it is when once you reach the $100K+ monthly volume mark.
I have six years of subscription service merchant-services and four years of payment with Paypal. To be honest, I can't distinguish whether one is more merchant friendly than the other. Both are bureaucratic but fair in dealing with chargebacks (we only get about a 0.1% rate). I know that the merchant account people have a lot of very aggressive sales people. Mostly idiots in my experience. They have never taken the time to understand what would be involved in my committing to a service, they've never delivered real data about uptime, support staff etc. Paypal never calls me, their support can always be reached within 30 minutes (they have this odd but reliable system of logging in with a problem, getting a case number, then calling with the case number) and their service has never gone done. The reporting for paypal is pretty messed up and as far as I can tell, they have no plans to fix it. For instance, you would think that the paypal-->quickbooks online interface would be state of the art. Surprise! (it sucks).