Switching to a new payment processing company
In the past 6 years since exosyphen studios was started, we have switched through several payment processing companies, for various reasons (looking for better fees, better service, etc). Through the years, things started to slowly get better. We went from paying a 20% cut to the processing company 6 years ago, down to 13.9%. I left RegNow about 3 years ago when I have fallen for their newest *scam*. I was offered the chance to switch to a new fee schedule of just 6.9% + $1. It looked great and I went ahead, without reading the very small fine print. Then I noticed that all customers were forced to also purchase a $6.99 “Extended download insurance”. Since this is something we already offer for free for all our products, I didn’t wanted it added to each order, and even then, force customers to pay for it. They could however uncheck the options manually, but I didn’t like the way my shopping cart looked, with an extra payable item added automatically. I tried switching back to the old fee schedule, but that didn’t work, as it was *no longer possible* (so I was told).
Everything was fine with the 13.9% from Emetrix, but over the time, trying to keep competitive prices, made me start looking for an alternative.
After searching for a while and finding several options which were good, I was still stuck on at least one item on my checklist not being met by every company. This is how we eventually came across FastSpring, which successfully passed all my requirements for a new payment processing company. This were:
- Lower processing fee, at least under 10% (We got 8.9% which reduced our processing costs per product, by 5%)
- Lower minimum fee amount, to allow us to sell cheaper software bits (We got $1 minimum instead of the $3 we had before).
- Bi-monthly payments within reasonable time (Instead of receiving January’s money on February the 15th, it’s better to receive it on January the 25th and February the 10th)
Extra goodies we got, without expecting them:
- Processing of PayPal payments (it simplified our shopping cart and order logistics a lot)
- Very fast and good tech support (it feels great to receive a reply on the same day, and most or all of the time in less then 1 hour)
- Complete integration of our site style and shopping cart by the FastSpring staff. It saved me a lot of work and testing to get it right.
Check them out for yourself, at http://www.fastspring.com
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