FeeFighters Blog

After experiments on many other places, I'd suggest that best place to find developers (the kind our startup wants, anyway) is this site. On the 1st of the month, a bot named whoishiring (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring) posts "who is hiring?" and "looking for freelancers" posts in which I put my companies (http://feefighters.com) needs. Posting on there has led to many good candidates for us. Also check out angelist jobs if you haven't. Both of these methods are free and have led to good candidates for us.

If anyone's in the market, compare gateways on https://feefighters.com/

great article. we ran an experiment over the summer with cold calling as well, as many people thought it would be a successful sales strategy for us. being in the payment processing world, we knew business owners were constantly being cold called and most likely did not want another point of contact. however, we wanted some data to show people who made that suggestion in the future. our hypothesis was correct: our conversion rate was nill, even when tinkering with the sales script. i think the variation is due to the fact that the target customers in this article were not as heavily cold called as our target market. so, it made them more open minded. here's a link that shows our data: http://feefighters.com/blog/950-and-1500-calls-tales-in-telemarketing/

The original report is extremely interesting too, I don't see how it's even legal what BBB does http://feefighters.com/blog/the-bbb-is-a-scam/ Xpay asked the BBB what they could do to fix the problem. It turned out that all they needed to do was grease the wheels. The BBB noted that Xpay wasn’t a member organization, and by becoming a member organization the BBB would “look into” those 11 complaints to see if they were worthy of being wiped clean. Xpay paid the BBB a fee of $760 (see fee schedule). Within a couple of days the rating had changed from an F to a C. A few days later and another phonecall, and the rating was changed to an A-. That's extortion.

This happens far too often. It's time to get a real merchant account... A couple of useful links I found on here: Use http://activemerchant.org for rails implementation of authorize gateway and http://feefighters.com to find and setup a merchant account (awesome service)

re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator. If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people. Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.

Get a merchant account if you can. Shop around. Although I haven't tried Fee Fighters, seems like it would be a good place to start for looking up a merchant account: http://feefighters.com/ Also merchant accounts often have a separate gateway but some banks own their own gateways which saves you money on top of the rates you negotiates. Factor this into the equation when you're shopping around.

I should also highlight that I was referred to this site http://feefighters.com/ which looks pretty good but is for US customers only.

There's a startup based here in Chicago called FeeFighters http://feefighters.com/ I've never tried it, but they'll apparently do this for you. They get a number of payment processors to bid for your business, and the winning bidder pays them a referral fee.

WePay is a consumer product that bridges the gap between Paypal and something like BillMonk (https://www.billmonk.com/) or Expensure (http://expensure.com/). With WePay, you can both keep track of and calculate group expenses as well as actually exchange money among a group and make use of it. You would never want to use WePay to process or receive payments for your product or service. Braintree serves as a combination of both a merchant account and a payment gateway. For examples of traditional merchant accounts, you could peruse Fee Fighters (http://feefighters.com/ - formerly transfs.com). The most common and most widely known payment gateway is Authorize.net.

Thanks for weighing in, Stella. I've just heard from Sheel via email with an apology, and now I've just gotten off the phone with Sean. He apologized for the support requests that have been dropped during the transition to GroupOn. At his request, I've removed the "Reflection" part of my piece, which admittedly engaged in unfounded speculation. I apologize. I'd also like to apologize to Sean and the team for not trying harder to contact them personally. For example, there is an email address and other contact info listed for Sean on the FeeFighter's About page (I had been looking at the Samurai About page): http://feefighters.com/about I believe that Sean and his team are making a good-faith effort to integrate FeeFighters with GroupOn. I've suggested to him that bringing back the three advertised support channels could be a good next step to maintain trust (the toll-free number, the Campfire chatroom, and the ZenDesk). I freely admit that I've tried to "make lemonade" from what otherwise was a bad situation for Gittip, by publishing this piece and submitting it to Hacker News. I appreciate Sean for calling me and working through the issue together at a personal level. I have no hard feelings towards him and his team, and I wish them all the best as they try to tame the complexity of a significant acquisition, for which, in the end, they are to be congratulated.

http://investors.dressrush.com/ http://squareup.com http://feefighters.com (go through the funnel to see what I mean) and their other page http://samurai.feefighters.com http://andyet.com

FeeFighters has a pretty good free ebook called "How to Be a Credit Card Processing Ninja" - http://feefighters.com/blog/free-ebook-launch-how-to-be-a-credit-card-…

"3) We get media coverage. We hustle and email and tweet a lot of reporters, etc, try to get interviews. Try to help them out all the time, refer friends businesses, etc. It works (http://feefighters.com/press - page not quite up to date). We paid a PR firm $5,000 a month. It didn't work." In my day job, we had a similar lack of success with a $5k PR firm. Lots of money, some press releases and really little to no press coverage and absolutely zero new business. At my small startup, I hustle and write tons of emails to every site I can think of that's mildly relevant and we've gotten a level of coverage we're happy with even if its just me firing off form emails in my spare few hours a week. (We've even managed to get a little radio coverage).

fees might be something to consider too: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator

If we're going to believe this website, looks like Apple will let you keep $3 more per $100 than PayPal and $11.50 more than credit card processors, assuming a $1 subscription fee like The Daily's: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator Maybe regulators should probe those guys. (Credit to @schwa on this one: https://twitter.com/#!/schwa/status/38676753316708352 )

Direct link: http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/transaction-flo…

Kudos for the "ballsy" simplicity. I don't know if people appreciate how big of a risk this is for Square. Square is placing a big bet on the numbers working out in the long run. If their analysis is just a little bit wrong, they're going to burn through millions of dollars in losses. Why? Because the 1.3% "sweet spot" is almost certainly well below their cost. "Interchange" is the wholesale rate that processors like Square pay to card networks. Visa & Mastercard publish their rates and as far as anyone knows they're not negotiable. According to FeeFighters which did a lot of public research around rates, the average interchange rate for a typical card mix is: 1.58% + $0.13 per transaction Unless they've figured out a way around standard interchange, this is Square's approximate cost. Remix that into a 2.75% flat rate and you'll find that Square already charges less than that cost for purchases below ~$6 (even considering that there's a special, lower small ticket interchange rate). And now for businesses that hit the sweet spot around $17-21K/month, Square's probably also taking a loss. No doubt Square is betting on a mix of merchants that fall in the profitable peaks between those troughs. All in the name of simplicity. Sources: http://feefighters.com/square-calculator http://usa.visa.com/merchants/operations/interchange_rates.html

There is no way that Cybersource + Wells Fargo is charging 1.45% for non-qual transactions. More likely they are doing something called Marking Up the Downgrades http://feefighters.com/blog/marking-up-the-downgrades/ where they quote a low "qualified" rate that only applies to a small minority of transactions. The wholesale rates for credit card processing (called interchange rates) are available online at visa and mastercard's websites (search for "visa interchange rates"). Without getting into details, all card-not-present transactions, regardless of card type, are more than 1.45%. Braintree's pricing is not the lowest, but I bet if you looked carefully at your statement from Wells you would find that it is worse than Braintree - some of the worst processing deals I have ever seen are from Wells Fargo. If you want to make sure that your processor is not pulling funny business with downgrades, insist on Interchange Plus pricing (http://feefighters.com/blog/interchange-plus/). Or just a completely flat rate with no downgrades. And then monitor it closely, this is one of the most crooked industries on the planet.