[slice_of_life]

>Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea.

This is obviously good for the card companies and to a degree the digital payments landscape as a whole.

I do however see how it can be a problem for small merchants who can't negotiate for better rates with MAPs due to lack of volume. A 2 - 3% fee is quite significant seeing as though many retailers will have a 7-12% net margin. For a merchant not to be able to push the cost to a customer even if it is just part of it would be difficult for a business to sustain. There are other costs that merchants are dealing with such as cost of packaging and as such, a 2-3% fee is no mean feat.

[pyre]

Well, you're also missing things like the onerous process that some of the processors would have you go through to sign up. While I haven't been the person to actually setup a Stripe account, my impression is that it's pretty light-weight. From what I remember the business people having to go through to sign up for a merchant account with a processor (for a 100% online business) back in ~2010, it was practically like signing up for a mortgage. There was also back-and-forth between different "levels" of employees on the other side of things. At one point, IIRC the process even stalled because their end stopped responding to enquiries from our company. On top of that we were forced to use their Java middleware crap even though we weren't a Java shop. They made you feel like they couldn't care less about your business.

[slice_of_life]

Well, the onboarding process in the past you've described seems like hell. May be merchants should simply accept to bite the bullet on this one and accept it as part of the cost of doing business.

Now that you've mentioned stripe; I am in the process of setting up an Australian company with stripe; so far the docs are easy to digest and it seems waaay easier (and cleaner) than my previous experience with paypal.