Stripe is nice but expensive – where is Amazon Payments?

I don’t think Stripe is expensive at all.

Amazon says: Our standard transactional rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per-transaction for transactions of $10 or more.
For transactions less than or equal to $9.99, we offer a fee of 5.0% + $0.05 per transaction.

To get the 1.9% here is what they say:
You may qualify for a volume discount if you have processed an average transaction volume of $3,000 or more with us over the past three months. In order to receive this discount, you will need to request and apply for it.

so to get the 1.9% you have to be processing over $3k per month for 3 months, then you have to apply for the discount. Otherwise you are going to pay the same as stripe 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

Merchant accounts are expensive. Using Stripe is not as expensive, until you are processing enough money to cover all the minimum charges of a merchant account.

Paypal business, also charges 2.9% + $0.30, at least on my account they do. I don’t have the pro version though.

Braintree though, is offering the first $50k of transactions FOR FREE!
so you save 100% of the fee’s for the first $50k worth of transactions.

My vote is for Braintree. Their fee is the same as everyone elses. 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and they deposit fast too.

I hope now that Stripe is done, they do Braintree.

That’s in the US.
In Europe Amazon Payments is 1.9% + 0,30 base!!!!
However you can easily get it down to 1.5 plus 0,30… because they strive to undercut paypal.

Same for Paypal Germany (well Austria is a different matter, but you can negotiate if you have some turnover). Also chargebacks are 10€ while you pay 15€ at stripe – and oh free on Papyal meaning you can negotiate them out at Amazon – again because they will do everything to undercut paypal.

Stripe is not even really interested to do business in Europe – or at least that’s how it seems to me. And it’s only available in select European countries – while Amazon Payments is available more or less worldwide if you qualify.

Also loads of users trust Amazon – that’s actually the key point. With Stripe it doesn’t give you any additional credibility…

AND – nearly everyone has an amazon account – so that means users login and BAM…
With Stripe users need to enter all their data. That is costing lot’s of conversion! So say it’s 1% more expensive, and you lose 10% of your customers on checkout. Hell, that’s really expensive – you end up with 10% gross loss, and 1% more costs…

Also I’m not sure if Stripe provides somehow acceptable income statements. In the end it could mean you spend countless additional hours on your income statement. I don’t really know about that one, but with Amazon I at least have a European (Luxembourg) Union company department to deal with – with Stripe I am begging at a US company…

So for European users Amazon is big, and Stripe is just another rather useless alternative…