8 ms·

Ask HN: Can payment processors like Stripe and their fees be avoided?

33 points by gfykvfyxgc 5y ago

Say you’re running an online store, selling something digital or physical. Is it practical to completely avoid the fees of payment processing companies like Stripe?

coalgebraic 5y ago
There is something called a merchant account that might be suitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account. I'm sure there are some fees associated with it but you should look into it and see if it will fit your use cases.
Mehmetvarta 5y ago
NaughtyShiba 5y ago
Handle payments yourself. And unless you have massive sales, those fees are cheaper and easier to maintain
ayende 5y ago
How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way. In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant. You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't add the right invoice number, for example). PayPal or similar also have their fees. Using crypto for payment is possible, but the wild swings in price means that this is a highly unstable option. There are fees there as well (0.5 USD - 1 USD), and the time to close a transaction is a lot (10 minutes, IIRC). It is also making things like taxes a pain. And that is where you start to get into really "fascinating" territory. A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  This cannot be understated enough. Accepting cryptocurrency may hit you with KYC requirements in your region, PayPal is frankly worse than Stripe, opening a merchant bank account just to process might not be worth it, and oh PCI-DSS audits will just kill your idea off the ground of processing credit card payments, not to mention the hassle of actually handling the fallout of card data leak. If you're not in the US and will only process domestic transactions are are willing to skip acceptance of credit cards, you would want to look if your environment allows a much more simpler acceptance system (for example in Canada, parts of Europe and India a merchant bank account is relatively frictionless compared to American ones). Otherwise, read on. Unless you're a very big company with dedicated accountants and backend logistics and in the fees collected by Stripe will be bigger than bringing it inhouse, it'll be much, much more expensive to be honest. Stripe probably is the least worst option right now since that you don't need to have a merchant bank account for example, which can be an headache. However, if you want to minimise data collection at any cost, then probably only accept cash and cryptocurrencies (that is, if you run a node and not outsource it a la Stripe)?
- Closi 5y ago
  I think this raises really great points - but I think there is one additional major question too which is "what scale are you dealing at?". If you are handling billions of dollars in sales, then yes, rolling your own payment infrastructure will probably be worthwhile, but at that scale you will also be getting a very different commercial offer from the payment gateways anyway. If you 'only' have a million dollars in sales, then there isn't going to be a payback here (but there may be a cheaper payment gateway than Stripe). The fees to Visa and MasterCard can't be avoided - even Amazon is having a public commercial spat Visa over fees.
  - 6510 5y ago
    And 3) If you have a small number of transactions bank transfers should work just fine.
- Jugurtha 5y ago
  >A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc. I signed up for Stripe thinking it was the case but it turns out they don't handle VAT and taxes and I have to find something else (looking into Paddle and I would be grateful for suggestions and ideas). How are people here dealing with VAT and taxes for their SaaS in 2021. Company is in France, Europe. Clients could be anywhere. I wanted a one stop shop and thought Stripe did that.
pkrotich 5y ago
Yes, make your customers mail you a check or cash /s
- joshvm 5y ago
  In the UK if you really didn’t want to use a processor you could ask people to bank transfer you cash (free for both parties with Faster Payments) or send cheques, although most banks are phasing them out. There are definitely web stores which have this as an option and I’ve seen it in NZ too. The downside is manual labour and a transfer speed of O(minutes). I used to help run a summer camp in Europe and we always took payment via direct transfer. None of us had the experience to write an e-commerce solution and we didn’t have the budget to buy one. Nowadays I guess we could use Stripe, but it’s still simpler to give people account details to pay into and to tell us when they sent it. We don’t have the numbers to justify anything complex either. Only recently we started accepting donations via PayPal and even then only because it’s very easy to generate the code for the button.
  - pkrotich 5y ago
    I was somewhat joking but my company takes checks too - some clients can only pay via check or wire with PO. But we insist on annual subscription simply because processing checks on monthly will be too much overhead not to mention delays.
glanzwulf 5y ago
Add in-store pickups and accept cash payments.
samarthr1 5y ago
But applicable for most countries outside of India, but UPI has no MDR. But it does have a 60k inr daily limit.
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening. It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic. Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.
- multjoy 5y ago
  Stripe and any number of the new fintech companies make card payments an absolute pleasure compared with the drama of getting merchant accounts, leasing a PDQ etc. We run an SME (a boarding kennel, so nothing exactly cutting edge) and Square costs us 1.75% for cardholder present transactions. No minimum charge, cash is in the next working day, they do all the compliance so provided I don't do anything mental like taking pictures of payment cards, I'm sorted. Obviously there's a higher cost for online processing and you could probably bring down the percentage cost if you shop around, but the ease of entry for card payments these days is absolutely astonishing. The biggest problem with crypto is that you, as a business owner, want to make it as easy as possible for people to give you their money and crypto is a massive frction unless you're marketing to the tiny subset of people using it as a currency rather than a value store. It'd be a bit like accepting gold over the counter.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Doesn't Bitcoin have transaction fees ?
  - pibechorro 5y ago
    It does, but in the not so distant future most smaller transactions will be on its 2nd layer wallets (lightning). Close to no fees and close to instant. Its steadily growing.
    - prirun 5y ago
      Smaller transaction fees are always in the future with crypto. It was a design goal in the beginning and still hasn't happened in 12 years (age of Bitcoin network).
rdbell 5y ago
Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  That's great if you don't plan to sell anything.
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  Good thing crypto exchanges don't charge fees.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  That's not doable in practise. - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular. - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again. There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Not sure what exchange you're using, but 0.1% on market trades is pretty common. That's very low compared to most fees.
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      You are misunderstanding the op. He wants a payment processor for merchants, eg. bitpay. 1% transaction fee Exchanges then have a: - 0,1 % withdrawal fee - Unknown/hidden? currency conversion fee. I would think there is a fee here, but i didn't find it documented. Additionally, exchanges like Binance are banned in many places ( because of tether fraud). Coinbase would be one of the only exchanges to consider as a business in eg. The US.
evolve2k 5y ago
If all your customers are local to your own country then yes you can engage a merchant e-commerce solution usually provided by a local major bank. These were popular before Stripe arose. You can save fees BUT the application process is often much more manual and long. Also don’t expect add-ons like having a good API or strong reporting or analytics.
- watchdogtimer 5y ago
  We had such an account before Stripe and Braintree were in existence. The rates weren't significantly better than what Stripe or Braintree offered, which is why we switched. I assume that's still the case...?
  - evolve2k 5y ago
    Here’s an example of such in Australia with one of our “Big 4” banks. https://www.payway.com.au https://www.payway.com.au The pricing is competitive as the currently charge a flat monthly fee which comes up much cheaper than stripe. I know as I’m integrating stripe into the new member site im building for our client and they’ve come back saying the old option is much cheaper. AUD $300-400/month flat fee from the top of my head. It’s missing many of stripes features though as I said earlier, which I’m now having to try to sell the client on as the benefit of additional automation and reporting coming at additional cost. Stripe is not straight up cheaper in this case.
saklani 5y ago
Don’t crypto exchanges use payment processors to transfer cash to bank account? I’m unsure about it though. Likely only option is pickup and delivery with cash payment or keep crypto only never cash out. I don’t think the latter is convenient though.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  The exchanges I've dealt with do not allow credit cards. I usually end up doing ACH transfers.
Const-me 5y ago
In my country (Montenegro), at least one logistic company supports cash on delivery for physical goods shipped within the country. Specifically, a buyer orders something, a seller ships the package, the logistic company delivers package + papers, takes cash + buyer’s signature, pays the seller. I never sold things that way, but I bought stuff couple of times paying cash.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  It's a barrier for consumers though, you have to be home when the package comes in or go to a delivery point.
karanbhangui 5y ago
crypto, debit, ACH (and RTGS equivalents in local countries like UPI in India and PIX in Brazil)
ketanip 5y ago
In India we have UPI by government no fees. It is a new way of payments that removes need for middleman and government even has a official app ( BHIM App ) for it and most importantly it is a protocol so anyone can use it without third parties ( private companies )involved. It now also supports subscriptions. Read more: UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct Read more at: 1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface 2. UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/87474515.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/87474515.cms 3. Search Google for "UPI in India"
- Kaze404 5y ago
  That's awesome. Sounds a lot like Brazil's Pix, which I saw some people in this website say would be a detriment to the "free market" and shouldn't exist. Lol.
  - ketanip 5y ago
    lol
- ketanip 5y ago
  Also it is supported by all payment apps including PayTm, PhonePe, and Google Pay India.
apollo_ 5y ago
US Centric answer: If you're looking to accept card payments, then no. Both credit and debit cards have interchange fees[0] that are unavoidable. Strong negotiation with a payment provider can land you on an "interchange plus"[1] type fee schedule, which means that they pass through their costs to process the transaction and add some small fixed amount. Note that card interchange fees can range from essentially 0% (debit cards) to >2% fees baked into them. Rewards cards can reach 2.5%+ -- merchants pay for rewards on these cards and eventually pass the cost onto everyone else in the form of higher prices. Now you could look at using something like ACH to automate bank debits. On paper, this could be as cheap as $0.10/txn. However, there's a litany of new issues to worry about. ACH payments take days to clear. The information needed to debit someone is printed on checks and given out, so now you've got a new authorization problem. People usually solve this with microdeposits or something like Plaid -- you're looking at more time and friction or more cost. People are not trained as well as with cards to punch their bank details into every other website. Crypto adds a bunch of friction for unsavvy users, has no dispute flow (though I guess that's to your benefit as a merchant), and can have pretty variable costs. Edit: at the end of the day, checkout completion rate is often more impactful than the fees. Other advice: 1) Try to negotiate with providers. You may not have sufficient leverage until you reach some scale, but it doesn't hurt to ask respectfully. 2) If you plan to grow your business for a long time: create local payments abstractions that make it easier to switch providers or support multiple providers later. Everybody has outages and this increases your negotiating leverage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee [1] Depending on the card distribution of your users, "interchange plus" can be more costly than a fixed plan.
Silhouette 5y ago
You can't avoid fees if you're accepting card payments. One way or another you will be relying on multiple specialist services to access the card networks and they are each going to take a cut. Cards are a broken and expensive payment method that needs to go away, and in some parts of the world that is already starting to happen, but it really depends on where your sales are. If you are aiming for customers in the US you're probably stuck with cards for now because it's what people and businesses expect to use. However if you're selling to somewhere like Europe you might get a much better deal with alternative payment methods like SEPA and the national schemes. There will still be fees and risks but they can be much lower than you'll ever get with card payments. Whichever payment method(s) you decide to accept you will still have to deal with the admin around taxes that has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. An alternative strategy of outsourcing everything to a specialist that handles both payment processing and tax admin is becoming increasingly attractive. As always if you're running a small business you might want to concentrate on whatever products or service you offer and outsource as much of the rest as you can. In this case the question isn't about how to avoid fees, because obviously you can't, but whether the amount you save is worth the fees you spend, which it easily could be.

33 points by gfykvfyxgc 5y ago

Say you’re running an online store, selling something digital or physical. Is it practical to completely avoid the fees of payment processing companies like Stripe?

coalgebraic 5y ago

There is something called a merchant account that might be suitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account. I'm sure there are some fees associated with it but you should look into it and see if it will fit your use cases.

Mehmetvarta 5y ago

NaughtyShiba 5y ago

Handle payments yourself. And unless you have massive sales, those fees are cheaper and easier to maintain

ayende 5y ago

How do you expect to get paid? That is a serious question, by the way. In general, let's say that you want to use credit card. That pretty much put you at the mercy of Visa & Mastercard. They charge you fees, and the cost of managing the interaction with them is significant. You can accept wire transfers, but note that this probably means quite a bit of dealing with the backend financial stuff (user paid, but didn't add the right invoice number, for example). PayPal or similar also have their fees. Using crypto for payment is possible, but the wild swings in price means that this is a highly unstable option. There are fees there as well (0.5 USD - 1 USD), and the time to close a transaction is a lot (10 minutes, IIRC). It is also making things like taxes a pain. And that is where you start to get into really "fascinating" territory. A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc.

zinekeller 5y ago
This cannot be understated enough. Accepting cryptocurrency may hit you with KYC requirements in your region, PayPal is frankly worse than Stripe, opening a merchant bank account just to process might not be worth it, and oh PCI-DSS audits will just kill your idea off the ground of processing credit card payments, not to mention the hassle of actually handling the fallout of card data leak. If you're not in the US and will only process domestic transactions are are willing to skip acceptance of credit cards, you would want to look if your environment allows a much more simpler acceptance system (for example in Canada, parts of Europe and India a merchant bank account is relatively frictionless compared to American ones). Otherwise, read on. Unless you're a very big company with dedicated accountants and backend logistics and in the fees collected by Stripe will be bigger than bringing it inhouse, it'll be much, much more expensive to be honest. Stripe probably is the least worst option right now since that you don't need to have a merchant bank account for example, which can be an headache. However, if you want to minimise data collection at any cost, then probably only accept cash and cryptocurrencies (that is, if you run a node and not outsource it a la Stripe)?
Closi 5y ago
I think this raises really great points - but I think there is one additional major question too which is "what scale are you dealing at?". If you are handling billions of dollars in sales, then yes, rolling your own payment infrastructure will probably be worthwhile, but at that scale you will also be getting a very different commercial offer from the payment gateways anyway. If you 'only' have a million dollars in sales, then there isn't going to be a payback here (but there may be a cheaper payment gateway than Stripe). The fees to Visa and MasterCard can't be avoided - even Amazon is having a public commercial spat Visa over fees.
- 6510 5y ago
  And 3) If you have a small number of transactions bank transfers should work just fine.
Jugurtha 5y ago
>A truly underrated value you get is the fact that payment processors deals with all those issues around taxes, VAT, etc. I signed up for Stripe thinking it was the case but it turns out they don't handle VAT and taxes and I have to find something else (looking into Paddle and I would be grateful for suggestions and ideas). How are people here dealing with VAT and taxes for their SaaS in 2021. Company is in France, Europe. Clients could be anywhere. I wanted a one stop shop and thought Stripe did that.

pkrotich 5y ago

Yes, make your customers mail you a check or cash /s

joshvm 5y ago
In the UK if you really didn’t want to use a processor you could ask people to bank transfer you cash (free for both parties with Faster Payments) or send cheques, although most banks are phasing them out. There are definitely web stores which have this as an option and I’ve seen it in NZ too. The downside is manual labour and a transfer speed of O(minutes). I used to help run a summer camp in Europe and we always took payment via direct transfer. None of us had the experience to write an e-commerce solution and we didn’t have the budget to buy one. Nowadays I guess we could use Stripe, but it’s still simpler to give people account details to pay into and to tell us when they sent it. We don’t have the numbers to justify anything complex either. Only recently we started accepting donations via PayPal and even then only because it’s very easy to generate the code for the button.
- pkrotich 5y ago
  I was somewhat joking but my company takes checks too - some clients can only pay via check or wire with PO. But we insist on annual subscription simply because processing checks on monthly will be too much overhead not to mention delays.

glanzwulf 5y ago

Add in-store pickups and accept cash payments.

samarthr1 5y ago

But applicable for most countries outside of India, but UPI has no MDR. But it does have a 60k inr daily limit.

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

You could accept Bitcoin as payment though your accountant may then find taxes frightening. It's not practical really no. There are ways (the way people did it before stripe). But it's much more painful and buerocratic. Stripe is quite friendly compared to the old way.

multjoy 5y ago
Stripe and any number of the new fintech companies make card payments an absolute pleasure compared with the drama of getting merchant accounts, leasing a PDQ etc. We run an SME (a boarding kennel, so nothing exactly cutting edge) and Square costs us 1.75% for cardholder present transactions. No minimum charge, cash is in the next working day, they do all the compliance so provided I don't do anything mental like taking pictures of payment cards, I'm sorted. Obviously there's a higher cost for online processing and you could probably bring down the percentage cost if you shop around, but the ease of entry for card payments these days is absolutely astonishing. The biggest problem with crypto is that you, as a business owner, want to make it as easy as possible for people to give you their money and crypto is a massive frction unless you're marketing to the tiny subset of people using it as a currency rather than a value store. It'd be a bit like accepting gold over the counter.
speedgoose 5y ago
Doesn't Bitcoin have transaction fees ?
- pibechorro 5y ago
  It does, but in the not so distant future most smaller transactions will be on its 2nd layer wallets (lightning). Close to no fees and close to instant. Its steadily growing.
  - prirun 5y ago
    Smaller transaction fees are always in the future with crypto. It was a design goal in the beginning and still hasn't happened in 12 years (age of Bitcoin network).

rdbell 5y ago

Take payment in crypto. Something like BCH if you want to minimize network fees. Programmatically move your funds to an exchange and convert to USD using your exchange’s API if you don’t want to hold crypto. Easy weekend project.

speedgoose 5y ago
That's great if you don't plan to sell anything.
lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
Good thing crypto exchanges don't charge fees.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
That's not doable in practise. - You would immediately take a hit, because crypto payments are not popular. - Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Many ecoms added support in 2017 and removed that functionality again. There's no interest for buying things that isn't part of the "pump and dump" scheme. NFT's are probably the only thing, since they hope to resell it for more money.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > Currency/btc conversion fees are more expensive than any transaction fee. Not sure what exchange you're using, but 0.1% on market trades is pretty common. That's very low compared to most fees.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    You are misunderstanding the op. He wants a payment processor for merchants, eg. bitpay. 1% transaction fee Exchanges then have a: - 0,1 % withdrawal fee - Unknown/hidden? currency conversion fee. I would think there is a fee here, but i didn't find it documented. Additionally, exchanges like Binance are banned in many places ( because of tether fraud). Coinbase would be one of the only exchanges to consider as a business in eg. The US.

evolve2k 5y ago

If all your customers are local to your own country then yes you can engage a merchant e-commerce solution usually provided by a local major bank. These were popular before Stripe arose. You can save fees BUT the application process is often much more manual and long. Also don’t expect add-ons like having a good API or strong reporting or analytics.

watchdogtimer 5y ago
We had such an account before Stripe and Braintree were in existence. The rates weren't significantly better than what Stripe or Braintree offered, which is why we switched. I assume that's still the case...?
- evolve2k 5y ago
  Here’s an example of such in Australia with one of our “Big 4” banks. https://www.payway.com.au https://www.payway.com.au The pricing is competitive as the currently charge a flat monthly fee which comes up much cheaper than stripe. I know as I’m integrating stripe into the new member site im building for our client and they’ve come back saying the old option is much cheaper. AUD $300-400/month flat fee from the top of my head. It’s missing many of stripes features though as I said earlier, which I’m now having to try to sell the client on as the benefit of additional automation and reporting coming at additional cost. Stripe is not straight up cheaper in this case.

saklani 5y ago

Don’t crypto exchanges use payment processors to transfer cash to bank account? I’m unsure about it though. Likely only option is pickup and delivery with cash payment or keep crypto only never cash out. I don’t think the latter is convenient though.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
The exchanges I've dealt with do not allow credit cards. I usually end up doing ACH transfers.

Const-me 5y ago

In my country (Montenegro), at least one logistic company supports cash on delivery for physical goods shipped within the country. Specifically, a buyer orders something, a seller ships the package, the logistic company delivers package + papers, takes cash + buyer’s signature, pays the seller. I never sold things that way, but I bought stuff couple of times paying cash.

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
It's a barrier for consumers though, you have to be home when the package comes in or go to a delivery point.

karanbhangui 5y ago

crypto, debit, ACH (and RTGS equivalents in local countries like UPI in India and PIX in Brazil)

ketanip 5y ago

In India we have UPI by government no fees. It is a new way of payments that removes need for middleman and government even has a official app ( BHIM App ) for it and most importantly it is a protocol so anyone can use it without third parties ( private companies )involved. It now also supports subscriptions. Read more: UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct Read more at: 1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface 2. UPI transactions over $100bn in Oct http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/87474515.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/87474515.cms 3. Search Google for "UPI in India"

Kaze404 5y ago
That's awesome. Sounds a lot like Brazil's Pix, which I saw some people in this website say would be a detriment to the "free market" and shouldn't exist. Lol.
- ketanip 5y ago
  lol
ketanip 5y ago
Also it is supported by all payment apps including PayTm, PhonePe, and Google Pay India.

apollo_ 5y ago

US Centric answer: If you're looking to accept card payments, then no. Both credit and debit cards have interchange fees[0] that are unavoidable. Strong negotiation with a payment provider can land you on an "interchange plus"[1] type fee schedule, which means that they pass through their costs to process the transaction and add some small fixed amount. Note that card interchange fees can range from essentially 0% (debit cards) to >2% fees baked into them. Rewards cards can reach 2.5%+ -- merchants pay for rewards on these cards and eventually pass the cost onto everyone else in the form of higher prices. Now you could look at using something like ACH to automate bank debits. On paper, this could be as cheap as $0.10/txn. However, there's a litany of new issues to worry about. ACH payments take days to clear. The information needed to debit someone is printed on checks and given out, so now you've got a new authorization problem. People usually solve this with microdeposits or something like Plaid -- you're looking at more time and friction or more cost. People are not trained as well as with cards to punch their bank details into every other website. Crypto adds a bunch of friction for unsavvy users, has no dispute flow (though I guess that's to your benefit as a merchant), and can have pretty variable costs. Edit: at the end of the day, checkout completion rate is often more impactful than the fees. Other advice: 1) Try to negotiate with providers. You may not have sufficient leverage until you reach some scale, but it doesn't hurt to ask respectfully. 2) If you plan to grow your business for a long time: create local payments abstractions that make it easier to switch providers or support multiple providers later. Everybody has outages and this increases your negotiating leverage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee [1] Depending on the card distribution of your users, "interchange plus" can be more costly than a fixed plan.

Silhouette 5y ago

You can't avoid fees if you're accepting card payments. One way or another you will be relying on multiple specialist services to access the card networks and they are each going to take a cut. Cards are a broken and expensive payment method that needs to go away, and in some parts of the world that is already starting to happen, but it really depends on where your sales are. If you are aiming for customers in the US you're probably stuck with cards for now because it's what people and businesses expect to use. However if you're selling to somewhere like Europe you might get a much better deal with alternative payment methods like SEPA and the national schemes. There will still be fees and risks but they can be much lower than you'll ever get with card payments. Whichever payment method(s) you decide to accept you will still have to deal with the admin around taxes that has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. An alternative strategy of outsourcing everything to a specialist that handles both payment processing and tax admin is becoming increasingly attractive. As always if you're running a small business you might want to concentrate on whatever products or service you offer and outsource as much of the rest as you can. In this case the question isn't about how to avoid fees, because obviously you can't, but whether the amount you save is worth the fees you spend, which it easily could be.