Your details show that you know your business well. What exactly does high volume of payments mean? What does low margins mean? With credit card processing,

Your details show that you know your business well. What exactly does high volume of payments mean? What does low margins mean? With credit card processing, it is about specifics. The magic numbers are: 1) Dollar amount processed by month 2) Average dollar amount per transaction From there, you can figure out the rest For startups, the default is ALWAYS Stripe (IMHO) because you can get to processing cards right away - like in 5 minutes. Their API is easy, their virtual terminal works as expected for manually keyed in transactions. There is even a super dumb screen that is just HTML (Checkout) if you don't even want to deal with an API. As far as the fees, the $0.30 per transaction fee is always going to be there. The 2.9% percent is negotiable, specially if you are doing volume. If you are doing $1,000/mo, 2.9% will be your rate. If you are doing much higher volume, that rate goes down. For example, if you can show (with proof via bank statements or from your current merchant provider) something like $300-400k per month for the last 3 months, I was able to get them very close to what is called the "interchange rate" which is the lowest rate you can get even with traditional processors like Moneris (FirstData). My current "effective rate" is about 1.6-1.7% (effective rate is my quick math of fees/total). Like somebody already said, micropayments are pretty bad. High volume + low margins make it sound like you are operating a restaurant where the fees are much more different due to the physical nature of the business (less fraud due to card present) vs internet (card not present)