Feeling the burn right now on this. I collect a $9 a month for my videos that have helped thousands of people learn to code and get their jobs. For over 3 years of running it I have not had a single dispute until now. One of my customers subscribed and has been watching my content for 2 months and decided that he is now done and decided to file a dispute.<p>Before I could even email them any evidence or make my case I was told I would most likely lose this dispute. My payment gateway told me they would charge me $500 for arbitration fee if I lost the dispute. I forwarded them my t&c and
proof that the customer has used my site and content. I even reached out to the customer to ask why they did what they did, no answer.<p>It’s a crappy system and online payments is broken. Credit card and payment processing is hugely broken and far behind the times.<p>Fortunately I am in the position to do something about it. My team and I just recently finished building and launched a new payment engine, we have already started processing payments in the millions of dollars just a few months in and will be taking on Banks, VISA, MasterCard and all traditional payment platforms. It sounds far fetched but when I’ve decided to tackle something I don’t fail. I’ve made it a personal goal to innovate in the payment space. I’m so very excited about the future.
I'm right in the middle of looking to jump ship from Stripe and PayPal. Stripe is increasing their conversion fees to 2% for grandfathered accounts on June 1st. They also have a 0.6% international card fee. Since I'm Canadian, this is going to hurt.<p>2.9% + 0.6% + 2% + $0.30 = more than a 6-6.5% cut for 90% of my sales.<p>While looking around for alternatives, Braintree stood out for having reasonable fees.<p>Although what really surprised me was that I'm not doing things by the book. Although I'm adding a sales tax for Canadian customers, I don't do this internationally. This is okay for the US and most of the EU since I'm well below their reporting thresholds, but it certainly adds some risk in back-taxes for other countries.<p>That's when I stumbled on a platform called FastSpring, which acts as a merchant of record. They handle all international sales tax for you and have cool features to show prices in your customers currency, etc... They have a steep price (around 6-8% I heard) but with Stripe increasing their fees to match close to this, why not switch and possibly make due-diligence a lot easier if I decide to sell?<p>Anyone else in a similar position? How do you handle sales tax globally? Is there a certain revenue number you should hit before worrying about this?
This is unfortunately still very true....<p>On transactions of $5, we’re paying anything between 8-15%<p>This obviously doesn’t include the App Store/Play Store, where you could be paying anything between 30-45% (the standard fee is 30%, but if you’re an indie seller, then usually you wouldn’t have to charge VAT to EU residents (as long as you earn under a certain threshold), but Google/Apple will still charge this to customers (I assume this is because the sale is being made in their name and obviously they’re VAT registered).
The worst thing about chargebacks and fraud in general is that there's no incentive for payment processors / card issuers to fix the issue as they are benefiting from it by charging the merchant a fee when a chargeback is filled.<p>There's also a whole business made on the basis of providing anti-fraud services.<p>By now, credit card security should absolutely be a solved problem and it's crazy that we still in 2020, have to input numbers printed on the card to pay online.
I hope that since 2015 this author has learned about interchange and realises that this is not down to the processors but to the issuers and schemes. This reads like a blog post about someone complaining that a bar charges more for beer than for what the brewery sells it to the bar owner.
This sounds like a good time to talk GoCardless. (Disclaimer: former employee, still have unexpired options).<p>Now, the downside is that this is recurring subscriptions only (e.g. SAAS) and not purchases. The upside is <a href="https://gocardless.com/en-us/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://gocardless.com/en-us/pricing/</a><p><pre><code> - Domestic pricing: 1% + $0.25 up to $2.50 maximum
- International pricing: 2% + $0.25.
Currency conversions at the TransferWise rate.
</code></pre>
UK/Euro pricing is even better, as that's their home territory. (And, you still can get chargebacks, but that's because some of these banking systems demand it.)
Is anyone here (or any business you know of) using crypto currency to avoid these extra fees with international customers? If you use a crypto currency, there is no way to reverse a transaction when the customer commits fraud.
Note that you can avoid the currency conversion fees using a Transferwise account. You'll get bank credentials for USD, EUR, NZ$, AU$ and GBP, and not pay the fees for these currencies: <a href="https://transferwise.com/help/19/transferwise-for-business/2977935/does-stripe-work-with-my-transferwise-account" rel="nofollow">https://transferwise.com/help/19/transferwise-for-business/2...</a>
I'd add a "4. Payment providers often follow the political and social trends of their host country, like Paypal/Visa/Mastercard/etc blocking payments to journalists or other groups when the US State or Justice Dept. doesn't like it."<p>Unfortunately the only way to get around this is with distributed systems of value exchange. And those have lots of friction.