My comment/question isn't about Stripe per se, but rather the surcharges of payment processors in general. It seems like 2.9% + .50 is about average, but then I see a site like https://sendmoneytoschool.com/ and they are charging a $1.00 processing fee for credit card payments to put lunch money in my kids' school account.
Is there some way to get super low processing fees if you don't use something like Stripe? Or are they taking money from the school and the parents? I'm just wondering how low of a rate is is possible to get for your ecommerce credit card payments?
It depends a lot on the card type, the location, the volume of the business and it’s risk profile, but eventually can get to a pricing scheme called interchange+, which is a fixed fee (generally <15¢) on top of the cost to process cards for your provider (so fee from the issuing bank + network fee).
In the US this varies a LOT depending on the card type, but most consumer cards are approx 1% interchange + a small fixed fee. In Europe these interchange rates are regulated at 0,3% for consumer cards. There are cases of special schemes (eg. CB in France) where processing can be even cheaper.
Thanks. I wasn't familiar with this. That's definitely significantly cheaper (transaction cost wise at least), but even then doesn't leave enough room to profit on the transaction fee alone so I'm assuming they must be charging the schools for the service and partially subsidizing with the convenience fees.
Is there some way to get super low processing fees if you don't use something like Stripe? Or are they taking money from the school and the parents? I'm just wondering how low of a rate is is possible to get for your ecommerce credit card payments?