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>And these service providers offer the >highest< processing fees. FTFY

The only people I've ever met that recommend Stripe are developers.

The only people I'd recommend Square to are merchants whose avg ticket is less than $5 or are borderline hobbyists.

The number of hardcore PP users has dropped significantly in the last 5 years, in my experience, to less than 10%.

A SaaS business I know of switched TO stripe.com from a more traditional processor / acquirer scheme for payment card processing, and saved a bundle. The traditional scheme had several layers of fees; the payment processor and then Visa / MC / AMEX, then the bank. Different card flavors (rewards cards, etc) offered different fee levels. Predicting fee levels was a probabilistic task.

Switching to Stripe, they got a two-tier one layer fee scheme. One tier for AMEX and a lower tier for MC/VISA.

The fee burden was noticeably lower with Stripe, too. the business I mention requested a fee discount and got it based on annual volume. But it was cheaper even without the discount.

So, where are the lower fees?

Square is really competitive up to about $15 a ticket

If you're doing significant volume, give them a call and they'll give you a custom cost-plus rate.

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