I will be opening an e-commerce website selling tangible goods in US and Canada. I am pondering on what payment processor I should choose. I was thinking Google Checkout might be good, since they got low fees. However, alot of people use paypal so it might be easier for many people to pay thru paypal. What would you recommend?
Depending on what you are selling, I would take paypal, and credit cards not through paypal, and then if you want to offer an additional payment method, google is a good third. If your products are something that tech savvy, or younger shoppers would be interested in, paypal is a must. As for credit cards, paypal is a very low cost method to start with. Once your sales pick up, you will probably want to switch to a more traditional merchant account / payment gateway and keep paypal as an alternative payment method. The only reason I don't recommend GCO as the only payment method from the start is that it doesn't offer any form of advanced / API payment integration, and I think that it is a very wise practice for sales and for tracking concerns to keep your visitors on your website for the entire transaction process.
Paypal's charges are too high. We offer rates half as high as paypal's. Shop around for the best rates and services.
That's a bunch of crap. I would love to see you offer a rate that competes with paypal after you factor in downgrades and monthly fees, of which paypal has none. Paypal is by no means a perfect system, and in many cases I can't stand them, but I guarantee that your deceptive rates aren't half of paypal's at the end of the month.
How can you guarantee that. I charge no monthly fees or minimum and our rates are fixed and start at 1.18%. Paypal charges 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. By looking at your signature, you are just trying to make a competitor look bad to make yourself look good. You just lost some credibility. Try to act professionally instead of offensively.
Both Visa's and Mastercard's interchange are higher than 1.18% for any normal card / transaction type, even signature debit. The only exceptions would be some government businesses, pin debit, and a few other rare business types. The reason that paypal is cheaper is because they can absorb the costs of downgrades because they don't have to pay anything for P2P transfers, which account for about 50% of all paypal transactions. So basically you're saying you can provide a merchant account with no batch, monthly minimum, statement, termination, monthly, yearly, downgrade, watts, or any other fee except a processing fee and a transaction fee, and that your customer's effective rate at the end of the month will be lower than paypal's? As far as my reputation goes, it speaks for itself. You wont find me trying to defend my shameless self promotion because I don't have any here or on any other forum, or even on my blogs. I also removed my business website from my signature just to make sure that I'm not saying all this for the purpose of making my company look good...
You can continue having a pissing contest with yourself. FYI: I know very well what Visa's and Mastercard's interchange rates are and you are wrong. Running a blog does not make you knowledgeable. Your pissing into the wind. I offer a great service at a lower price. Stop trying to make that somehow look bad. It's not a court room drama. You have just made yourself look stupid to everyone who actually does know the interchange rates and fees. I have them memorized for a living. Please stop harassing me. It is very annoying.