You are probably only looking at high level solutions, like Braintree.
Take a look at the more do-it-yourself solutions, and you'll see different numbers. For instance, we have a merchant account with Merchant e-Solutions. The base rate is 2.19% + $.20/transaction. I say "base rate" because there are other costs that depend on the particular card.
For example, for Visa there are these:
• "Acquirer Processing Fee", $0.0195/transaction.
• AVS fee, $0.01/transaction, only applies to transactions that make use of the address verification service.
• 0.097% if the card is a commercial rewards card. (10% of the cards)
• 0.45% "international acquiring fee" if the card is international, and 0.40% "international service assessment" on top of that.
• 2.39% labeled as "VISA NON-QUAL". I have no idea what the criteria for this is, but it gets applied to about 5% of the cards.
So, the actual cost of a transaction for a particular Visa card can be as low as 2.19% + $0.2195, and as high as 6.4% + $0.2295.
Last time I ran the numbers, it worked out that for Visa cards it averaged out to 2.62% + $0.23/transaction, and for MasterCard 2.80% + $0.23/transaction.
The downside to this is that providers that offer this kind of fine grained pricing tend to be targeted toward merchants who are looking for low level solutions--merchants handling their own credit card storage, doing their own recurring billing, and so on.
That is probably not a road you want to go down, especially if you are small and just starting out, and doubly especially if your servers are not servers you own. Doing PCI complaint credit card handling in the cloud on something like AWS is difficult and not something you want to deal with while dealing with the other aspects of a young business, like developing and promoting and supporting your product.
Take a look at the more do-it-yourself solutions, and you'll see different numbers. For instance, we have a merchant account with Merchant e-Solutions. The base rate is 2.19% + $.20/transaction. I say "base rate" because there are other costs that depend on the particular card.
For example, for Visa there are these:
• "Acquirer Processing Fee", $0.0195/transaction.
• AVS fee, $0.01/transaction, only applies to transactions that make use of the address verification service.
• 0.097% if the card is a commercial rewards card. (10% of the cards)
• 0.45% "international acquiring fee" if the card is international, and 0.40% "international service assessment" on top of that.
• 2.39% labeled as "VISA NON-QUAL". I have no idea what the criteria for this is, but it gets applied to about 5% of the cards.
So, the actual cost of a transaction for a particular Visa card can be as low as 2.19% + $0.2195, and as high as 6.4% + $0.2295.
Last time I ran the numbers, it worked out that for Visa cards it averaged out to 2.62% + $0.23/transaction, and for MasterCard 2.80% + $0.23/transaction.
The downside to this is that providers that offer this kind of fine grained pricing tend to be targeted toward merchants who are looking for low level solutions--merchants handling their own credit card storage, doing their own recurring billing, and so on.
That is probably not a road you want to go down, especially if you are small and just starting out, and doubly especially if your servers are not servers you own. Doing PCI complaint credit card handling in the cloud on something like AWS is difficult and not something you want to deal with while dealing with the other aspects of a young business, like developing and promoting and supporting your product.