[OliverJones]

Hmm. For the typical card-not-present (online) use case, stripe.com and paypal do a pretty darn good job of processing AMEX payment cards, as well as the others.

Tokenization is vital in this age of cybermiscreants. Ya don't want customer payment card data in your dbms.

The stripe.com API offers tokenization, and it offers the ability to send and validate data like zip/postcode, cvv and street address to cut fraud. They have an api for chargeback disputes, too. (The business I serve doesn't use it, instead we use the forms on their web site. We have dozens of disputes per decade, not worth programming.)

Squareup.com (Square) does a good job with card-present transactions.

And these service providers offer predictable processing fees.

I wonder what's special about the AMEX APIs? Maybe somebody from AMEX can explain? Some of us are always looking for better ways to serve customers and handle payments efficiently.

[enra]

One benefit can be that you access / pay with Amex points, which I think Stripe doesn't offer.

Also I've seen Amex offer login/auth verification, where you a service can verify you as the actual Amex user, and possibly trust you more that way.

[wil421]

I booked some museum visits in Italy this past summer. On a few of the sites I'd be sent to AMEX and enter some verification codes before the payment would process.

Never seen it in the US but it would be nice. I feel more comfortable going directly to AMEX first. Some website payment systems are shady feeling.

[ecommerceguy]

>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%.

[OliverJones]

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?

[mikesickler]

Square is really competitive up to about $15 a ticket

[traek]

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

[contingencies]

offers tokenization

s/tokenization/lockin/ # devil's advocate

[wpietri]

Not sure why this is downvoted, but it's a fair point. I know of a small business with a lot of subscriptions and this became a big issue for them when provider quality declined.

[tomschlick]

From what I have seen you can easily contact support and they will export your customer's card number for import into another provider.