I'd honestly prefer some sort of a not for profit organization running them (like Canada's eTransfer with some additions, Europes bank to bank payments, etc). Anytime money is involving it ends up resulting in laundering money, fraud, stealing money, high transaction fees, or anything else.
I want something completely unrealistic- a company that does one thing and doesn't aspire to do more. No extra add ons 2 years in, no extra services, just do payments.
Most of the conventional merchant services platforms do this, but they lack all of the modern-web polish that stripe and paypal and square have. They will happily take your volume on a cost-plus basis if you can handle the absolutely disgusting 1998 web presence and lack of docs, and often the antiquated API's that use SOAP and XML.
They're great. They don't change. All payments API's are shit, but one that is predictably shit and doesn't change once you've dealt with the shit is a quasi-meta-good thing as bad as that sounds. You have a person you can speak to, they know you on a first name basis, and they do a single thing- facilitate your ability to process payments.
I always keep an eye out, and haven't yet found an alternative to PP. My situation is that I sell a hardware gadget, and run my business from a passive web page. PP lets me create forms that link to their website, so they actually handle the transaction themselves. Most of the other services seem to start with: "Here's a sample of the code that you need to have running on your server."
This liberates me from running a web server, having my own URL, or doing any kind of coding. I love coding, and do it all the time by day, but it would add a layer of complexity to my business that I don't need.
PP has worked fine for me, but they always say that you should have a backup.
Liberapay was the smoothest payment experience I ever had, but I don't know if you have to be a non-profit to be listed there or something.
Other than that, I always appreciate when one can simply fall back to a bank transfer, then I can choose to just give them 100% of the money without risk to either party (no magic fraud detection, no cut going to paypal) at the cost of waiting a few days for the payment to be confirmed. So basically, just post your IBAN on your website please and offer to tick that as a payment option. No third party needed besides the bank account that you already need for running a business.
There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using bank transfers and being told that a payment has completed (even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant). So while this can work for a donation model, where the individual payments are not connected with access to services or goood, it really doesn't work where you (the provider of said services or goods) need to know that the payment has completed.
> There's no real API (certainly within the USA) for using bank transfers and being told that a payment has completed
As a consumer, I can just download the transaction list as CSV. There doesn't really need to be a standard API if it takes 5 minutes to map your bank's fields in your favorite scripting language. For business accounts, I'm presuming this will be similar, if not better because they would more frequently actually use it.
Even including thorough testing, it should be a few hours of work, and for that you can save whatever cut third parties would otherwise take before it lands in your bank account, plus the consumer doesn't need to deal with fraud shenanigans that might trip incorrectly.
> even worse, most of the bank transfers are far from instant
Yes, I mentioned that as a downside and it really is one, but for anything but food delivery I'm quite likely to choose this option. The anti-fraud on other methods, as someone frequently working across borders and with uBlock and such installed, just makes it impossible or annoyingly hard to pay too often otherwise. Plus, I don't want to give paypal more money if that choice is available to me.
I make my income from people buying software from me. After they've paid, their expectation is that they will get a link that they can follow to download the software.
This is not possible with US-style bank transfers at this time.
A company I used to work for used eWay as a backup - apparently the fees were a bit higher than Braintree but it functioned perfectly as a failover payment gateway.
