Until his service grows much, much larger he'd be paying more with most merchant accounts. And he'd be on his own for paying out to the donation recipients, which this company is handling as part of their transaction fee.
I've worked with 3 different merchant account providers over the past 8 years. All of them, in the end, ended up costing more than twice the rates they originally quoted when I applied. Downgrading most cards to higher fee schedules, having a dozen fees 3rd party processors simply build into their flat rate, and the ability to raise rates every month for years can add up to a very high effective transaction rate.
PayPal, once you pass $10000/mo for the 2.2% tier, is currently my cheapest processor when you factor in all the processing, gateway and monthly fees. I still accept credit cards directly for various reasons, so I'm trying to move off directly storing cards in Authorize.net's CIM to a service like SpreedlyCore that will let me switch merchant account providers without losing my current customer billing info.
1. twice the rates? That's outrageous. You do know it's SOP to regularly get quotes for your merchant account? First data will match those quotes. Think of their (typically) annual rate increases as motivation to do your job and get the quotes.
2. Read your contract. First Data (and every other processor I've ever dealt with) gives 30-days to withdrawl from the contract when they send their notice of rate increase.
3. Did you look over the interchange matrix first data gave you? It's pretty clear on what you need to submit to receive the qualified rate.
4. Authnet gateway? I like their gateway too... but it's an added and unnecessary expense. First Data has a gateway that you can get them to include for free (although you will have to do your job and negotiate for it).
5. authnet CIM? For a few thousand dollars in hardware, you can store the card data yourself... unless you're dealing with a small number of transactions, you're going to have to do this anyway.
Yes, I know dealing with credit card processing is a pain.. but the above? You're just tossing money out the window.
Interesting. I went out to the balancedpayments site to see who they are. Absolutely no information. Am I not seeing a link somewhere on their page? The fact that they are using Godaddy as an SSL certificate provider/reseller and the certificate says run by "unknown" just makes me cringe.
Edit: Apparently there are some staff bios on the Community Page. Founded 2010. Is anyone familiar with other start-ups using them as well?
That page was put up in the past week or so, and the whole thing was rebranded from PoundPay a month or two ago--right about the time I started talking to them. Here's an etherpad where a lot of our initial conversation took place, with some additional background and info:
Actually you dont need an EV certificate in order to show the name of the society inside the certificate, you need the EV cert only if you want to show the name in the browser bar.
Just as an example (no affiliation with thawte):
Tipically the price of this certificate grows from one type to the other and also the required documents/paperwork changes (if you register a simple fqdn certificate many times the procedure is completely automated, if you register a certificate with the company inside, or an EV cert, you must send relevant documentation about your company)
Having said that, I would expect this kind of businesses to have at least a certificate with company details inside, or better an EV cert..
no, the site validation AND the second link do NOT include the company name in the SSL cert when you click on the cert details. You need an EV cert for that.
The site seal with a popup that includes the company details is not what me nor the op are referring to.
Also, I did have a "real merchant account" with FirstData when I was with FeeFighters, and I kept getting stupid opaque fees. The new wave of companies abstracting away that bullshit has not arrived too soon, imo.
I've got a conversation going with Braintree to get another "real merchant account," but with Balanced contributing code, and Braintree only half the solution (still need ACH), and getting burned by FirstData ... what's my incentive?
