I’ve just spent some time comparing payment providers in an attempt to
- Get a better deal than I currently get from the bank
- reduce the ongoing costs from the bank
Just to be clear, I’ve been using Xero for some time to do all of my invoicing (I moved over from Lightspeed because they started removing features from the software and tried to move me to their cloud hosted product which would have doubled my yearly spend)
Obviously making it easy for your clients to pay your invoices has a lot of benefits for both you and your customers. And Xero has a function where it will accept many different processing providers, so I endeavoured to find the one that was best for my business.
Let’s have a look at the table comparing Paypal, Stripe and Square-
| Feature | Stripe | Square | ANZ EFTPOS | PayPal |
| Monthly | $0.00 | $0.00 | $78.95 | $0.00 |
| Per Trans | 1.75% + 30c | 1.9% | 1.95% | |
| ecommerce/ Keyed in/ Invoices | ? | 2.2% | ? | 2.6% + 30c |
| over the phone | 2.2% | 3.6% + 30c | ||
| Amex | yes- no extra | yes- no extra | yes- extra= 2.75% | yes- no extra |
| Apple Pay | yes- no extra | yes- no extra | yes | |
| Xero integration | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Bank Acc deposit time | initially 10 days, then 2 | 1-2 business days | overnight | |
| Chargebacks | $25.00 | $0.00 | ? | ? |
| EFT | No | No | yes | yes |
Now, I needed to check out the features in relation to my own business, and these are the considerations-
1. My transactions are often $1-5k
2. Zero chargebacks in last 10 years
3. Some months have zero Credit Card transactions
Then I needed to consider the company reputation and look at how their policies would affect my transaction fees-
Square- looks like most of my transactions would not be in person or through their app, so they would attract a 2.2% fee
