Credit Card Tax

Business Solutions to avoid fees?

[aleksl]

Want to ask semi- and wildly successful ecommerce entrepreneurs. What is your solution as far as the business operations go? How do you avoid Credit Card Tax?

Are there solutions out there that will charge monthly fees instead of % off transaction? Is this industry ever going anywhere, because quite frankly, I am tired of being charged 2% of all transactions, and then yet one more time credit card fees when we miss payment of our balance completely in full by a few dollars.

[ytswy]

The way I understand it, you need to be brick and mortar to tap into the cheap network for debit cards. My processor is treating them like credit cards. I would like to know if others who are ecommerce only are able to get the cheap rate for debit card processing. Been wondering about that since this court decision.

Ah, I don't handle the payment side of it, so I'm a bit light on details, but we are B&M as well as ecommerce.

[aleksl]

I've looked at Bitcoin. A promising P2P currency, but not yet mature.

[MisterT]

we recently dropped our merchant account and it felt extremely good. i mean really good. all the whiz-bang fees every month drove me crazy! the monthly statements were confusing, on purpose, so it was hard to tell what we were really paying them. the monthly fee, the swipe fees, the per transaction fee, fraud fees, etc.., etc..., it was crazy! what did all the fees add up to as a % of each sale? i still don't know. i don't care. i have moved on.

now, we are doing purely amazon payments, paypal payments, etc.. and sales are better than ever. i don't ever want a "traditional" merchant account ever again. i want my fees to be very clear and easy to understand, that is all.

if you have the right product at the right price, your customer will be flexible how they submit their online payment.

[HRoth]

So on your stand-alone website, you only take Paypal now? Might I ask what percentage of your gross comes from Amazon vs. stand-alone website sales? Just curious. I feel the same way about the fees, that they deliberately try to make it impossible to figure out what they are. The only way I have found to really tell the total amount they take in fees is to contrast what the gateway says I got and what the bank deposits actually were.

[jwolthuis]

I've looked at Bitcoin. A promising P2P currency, but not yet mature.

Unless they fix the start-up time of their client, it's DOA for eCommerce purchases. No one is going to pay using a currency where the program takes >5 minutes to load, as it builds the "chain".

Whoever invented BitCoin probably got a "A" on their term paper, but it fails in real-world use.

[MisterT]

So on your stand-alone website, you only take Paypal now? Might I ask what percentage of your gross comes from Amazon vs. stand-alone website sales? Just curious. I feel the same way about the fees, that they deliberately try to make it impossible to figure out what they are. The only way I have found to really tell the total amount they take in fees is to contrast what the gateway says I got and what the bank deposits actually were.

We take credit cards via paypal. The customer does not need a paypal account to pay. Using paypal for credit card processing has been much easier to understand all the fees. The amounts they charge are up front and easy to understand. You can integrate paypal with your website just like a merchant account if you want, customers never even know it is paypal doing the processing.

[Planet13]

For what it's worth, our credit card rates through our merchant processor are MUCH lower than our paypal rates.

Maybe we don't do enough business to negotiate lower rates with paypal or something.

[HRoth]

When you factor in all the fees, is it still lower? My processor really knows how to weasel in those feels.

[Soma]

Processor touching you inappropriately? Tell him "No means NO!"

[HRoth]

Doh! It does indeed feel like "bad touch."