I ditched my shitty merchant account and signed up with a new company a couple of weeks ago. It's only the second time I've done so in the dozen years that I've accepted credit cards on the Internet. For the uninitiated, a merchant account is an intermediary between a customer's credit card bank and your own bank account.
The good news is that the discount fees, the percentage that the bank keeps before giving you the rest, are significantly lower. The per transaction fees are about the same, and there's also a minimum, but it will be just slightly in my favor overall in the slower season where I don't sell a lot of memberships on CoasterBuzz. In the spring and summer, it will most certainly be a beneficial change. I also made the switch because I hope to turn my little project into a business.
Banking in general still feels like such a scam where consumers always lose. It really seems even worse for businesses. It's not horrible for me, because most years (when I'm not buying computers or cameras), it's a fairly high margin business. But I can't imagine having to sell real goods and having to price them high enough to make a profit and cover all of the fees.
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