[joking]

you seem to forget about the credit card rates, which are the 2.9% of your sales. I don't know in other countries, but where I live you can get the same conditions than for a physical pos terminal from a bank with around 1% rate. a 2% of your sales can easily grow to something that you can optimize.

[RickS]

I did almost mention those. Negotiating POS rates is in the realm of much bigger shops than I've run. At the 100k/mo mark, that's $2k/mo, which... I'd honestly still take shopify, but yeah, it starts to be worth asking about.

Shopify is a hair more expensive than some competing processors, but when I last dealt with it, they were in league of paypal, stripe, square, etc, so it wasn't a differentiating factor for us, and I suspect that's true for most businesses of our size.

[rhizome]

Of course it's not perfect and would eventually be re-engineered, but I'd happily pay $3K/mo to make $100K/mo.

[joking]

if you take in account that when selling physical items the selling margins are between 15% and 25%, you are paying 3k to make 15K profits, thats a 20% of your benefits. In much cases those 3k could be the difference between a profitable business and one that isn't profitable.

[robryan]

Yeah, that is the issue we have. Something like Stripe at 2.9% you don't think twice with a high margin SASS product, on 15% margins and enough volume though it makes sense to go through some pain to setup with a cheaper processor.

[JacobDotVI]

This isn't necessarily a fair comparison - card not present transactions have always had a much higher rate than point of sale transactions due to the increased risk of fraud. There's an open-ended question of if new entrants like Apple Pay can bring down those card not present fees thanks to their integration into your apple id, but tbd.

[joking]

at least in europe with 3d secure authentication, it's easy to get rates under 1% for a new business. If you have big volume is easy to go downwards from that.

I get that using stripe or paypal it's easier sometimes, but for woocoomerce and alikes you usually have plugins already developed to use other payment platforms.

[nemothekid]

For 40 hrs/wk at $60/hr, is $10,000/mo.

If Shopify means they hire this guy for a tenth of the time, they save $9000.

They would have to be moving 300k/mo for hiring a full time to even break even.

In any case you can do what everyone else does, bake the fee into your prices and call it a day - it's not like you can compete with Amazon on the low-prices front anyways.

[workinnow]

2.9% is the rate for their $30 a month plan, their $300 plan is 2.4% which leaves you within 1% from most of the cheapest payment processors while getting a ton more 'value' IMO.

[thirdsun]

In europe it’s even 1.8% on their $300 plan.

[woah]

They let you choose among a wide range of processors

[rnotaro]

It`s important to note that they add a 2%/1%/0.5% transaction fee on top of your processor fee with Basic Shopify / Shopify / Advanced Shopify plans, respectively.