The tremendous popularity of eBay and other consumer auctions in the last few years created a need for low-cost means of transferring money that protect both the seller and the buyer. This has spawned a number of new solutions -- PayPal, BillPoint, Yahoo! PayDirect, C2it, eMoneyMail, and BidPay. Of these, only PayPal has really matured to
the point where it is of much use to serious online merchants outside the auction arena.
We've also listed three e-commerce systems -- CCNow, ClickBank, and DigiBuy -- that handle the entire credit card transaction. They require little or no set-up fees, but charge transaction rates from 7.5% to 13.9%. Because of the high transaction fees, these are useful only for products with a high mark-up.
Finally, we've compared these prices to typical fees paid by merchants that have both a merchant account and a payment gateway. These typically require substantial set-up fees, and minimum monthly fees in addition to a discount rate (percentage of the transaction amount) and a flat transaction fee.
Restrictions
Percent of Transaction
Transaction
Fee
Monthly Fees and Set-Up Fees
International
US funds are transacted by all these systems
Standard account limited to $500 transactions, $2000 for merchant account. Currently limited to eBay sellers.
For transactions over $15,
2.5% + 0.5% (1.75% + 0.5% for high volume sellers), 1.5% + 0.5% for electronic checks (0.75%
+ 0.5% for high volume sellers).
35¢
None
Sellers must be US or Canadian residents. Payments can be received from 50
countries.
Yes. But mails checks only to countries with "good" postal systems, not to the Caribbean, Central & South America, & most African & Middle Eastern Markets.
