In late 2013 Google Checkout shut down permanently. This has left us with only Paypal as a payment option, and some members are unable to pay us using it (or do not wish to use Paypal). So, we need a new payment processor.
The current plan is to take all of the potential payment processors and call a vote of the membership, implementing the top two choices as soon as possible.
1. Goals
- Accepting payments from countries that paypal does not support
- Acceptable to members who hate Paypal
For reference, Paypal charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and slightly more for payments originating in some countries
2. Candidates
List any payment processor you might want to support here. All options will be added to a poll, and the leading ones will be implemented.
2.1. Coinbase
- fees: 1% + $0.15 for every ACH to our account
The good:
- Really low fees. They are also waiving the 1% conversion fee from the looks of it. However, the fee is per ACH (for daily receipts) so we can't really associate it with any given member. With fees so low, however, we could simply enter the transfer fee as a general bill.
- Overstock.com is accepting bitcoin, why aren't we? (Automatically converted to USD of course)
- Payment button support, so we could continue our manual payment processing (path of least resistance / fast implementation)
- reddit uses them
The bad:
- Fees only only daily transfers makes it hard to split among members paying us
Amount is so small (less than $5 per month, if we had payments come in every single day) we could treat it as a bill
- Payment button support
- Encourages slack toward implementing automated payment processing
2.2. Stripe
- fees: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction
The good:
- reddit uses them
- supports recurring payments
- requires us to set up automatic payment processing
- Higher integration effort, but then we'll have automated payments
The bad:
- Requires us to set up automatic payment processing
- Embrace the slack. If we use a language with OAuth2 and their REST API wrapper library available, probably an afternoon of programming. If we do use SML, a lot more (SML/NJ has a JSON library, but we'd be writing the first OAuth and HTTP client libraries for SML...)
3. Non-Candidates
These payment processors are not going to work.
- Square
- Their online payment processing is for their digital market only
- They only accept US credit cards anyway
- Direct ACH
We might be able to, but it requires the treasurer to ask the bank a number of questions. Perhaps after Election2014 if there is interest.