Fees for differant Payment Providers

[MibUK]

I'm currently calculating the fee's taken by some of the most common payment providers. I figured that the numbers I'd calculated may be of interest.

I'm posting this to ensure that
A) I've got my sums right, all fo the information was taken from the websites
B) To spark some discussion about differant payment providers.

The providers I details include BMT Micro, eSellerate, RegSoft, Plimus, ShareIt and PayPal.

The payments here are taken at the worst case for all sellers, assuming that sales are around $1000 a month at most. many of these companies provide better terms if you are turning over more than that, but it becomes harder to calculate in a spreadsheet all of that info!

I have included a conversion rate of approximately 0.6 USD to GBP (actually 0.5733 at exact moment of writing)

these are the fees taken per sale. there may be extra fee's for transfering the money to your account, and bank fees for converting from USD/EUR to GBP.

Cost £1.99 £2.99 £3.99 £4.99 £9.99 £19.99 £24.99 £29.99 £34.99
PayPal £0.07 £0.10 £0.14 £0.17 £0.34 £0.68 £0.85 £1.02 £1.19
BMT £0.75 £0.75 £0.75 £0.75 £0.75 £1.14 £1.42 £1.71 £1.99
Eseller £0.12 £0.18 £0.24 £0.30 £0.60 £1.20 £1.50 £1.80 £2.10
RegSft £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.80 £1.87
Plimus £0.45 £0.45 £0.45 £0.45
Plimus £0.60 £1.20 £1.50 £1.80 £2.10
ShareIt £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77 £1.77

There are two Plimus lists because there are differant rates for under $8 and over $8.

As far as I can see, the most money efficient way to sell your games is to do everything yourself and accept PayPal. Of course that may not be the most customer friendly way of doing so, althouhg in these days of eBay most people who purchase online probbaly have a PayPal account (maybe).
For some reason, RegSoft and ShareIt seem to take a large minimum amount compared with all the others, but that might be my maths beign wrong somewhere.

I'd like to know from people who are currently selling, whether these seem to reflect around about the right amounts or if I've made any major mistakes.

I'd also like to know from people whether they find the services provided by these payment providers are worth it, or whether simply having a PayPal only link would suffice these days.

Hope this helps any other beginning indies who haven't decided what payment provider to use as well.

Links for all providers are
https://vendors.bmtmicro.net/newdevelopers/service_tiers.html
http://www.esellerate.net/pricing.asp
http://www.regsoft.com/pricing.shtml
http://www.plimus.com/jsp/fee_schedule.jsp
http://www.shareit.com/faq.html
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside&countries=

[Kestral]

It is a shame to give away %10-%15 of your profits to a payment provider. On the other hand, if you force your customers to use PayPal you will likely lose at least that % in sales because many people still aren't used to the idea of payment through a third party like PayPal.

For my first game, my *current thinking* is to use a payment processor for the first few months while I get an idea of how sales are going to be. If I am so lucky as to be losing hundreds of dollars to the payment provider then I will go ahead and build my own payment gateway. If sales are weak then thankfully I used that development bandwidth for something else.

[lakibuk]

About Shareit: Why do you have 1.77/19.99 (=8.8%) ?
I am paying 16% to them.
And BMT: 1.14/19.99=5.7%. Don't they charge something like 10%?
Are you sure your numbers are correct?

[Mark Sheeky]

For reference, Share-It have two fee structures as follows. They cross over at about $30.


Model A (USD 2.95 + 5.00% of the product price)
Model B (14.90% of the product price with a minimum charge of USD 2.50)


Mark

[soniCron]

RegShare (http://www.regshare.com/) has already done this work for you, and in much greater depth. Browse the cost matrix here (http://www.regshare.com/matrix1a.asp).

[Travis Dorschel]

soniCron beat me to it - I recommend http://www.regshare.com too...

[MibUK]

About Shareit: Why do you have 1.77/19.99 (=8.8%) ?
I am paying 16% to them.
As I understand shareit's page, ShareIt charges a minimum fee of $2.95, which approximates to £1.77.
As Mark mentioned, Model A has only a 5% fee, which is less than the minimum fee.
I didn't work out Model b at all for my spreadsheet as I thought the crossover point ot be about $50 or so, (roughly I didn't do the math) which seemed higher than any price I'd think of charging (maybe, although £19.99 is about $40 I guess).
Maybe I'll add that Model as well.


And BMT: 1.14/19.99=5.7%. Don't they charge something like 10%?
Ah now that is interesting, I've just double checked my sheet, and I have indeed made a small mistake, or at least not made something clear.
The game cost is in dollars, not in GBP, but the payment amount is in GBP.
Thats a bug in my spreadsheet, I might fix it, although the regshare link means that my spreadsheet might not be that useful anymore

Are you sure your numbers are correct?
Nope, thats why I posted it to see if anyone was able to call me out and point out I had really bad figures.

thanks to you I noticed that funny about the game prices being in dollars, not GBP. I'm not sure whether to change that or not...

RegShare has already done this work for you, and in much greater depth.

Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen this page at all.
RegShare is in a greater depth, but of course everything there is in USD, whereas I'm workng in GBP, plus my spreadsheet is capable of adding the oversees transfer charges (although the above matrix didn't yet).

Anyway, I'll add that link to my del.icio.us account so I wont forget it.

Thanks to all of you

Mib

[Tom Gilleland]

I'm really surprised so many of you guys use Plimus/BMT/Kagi/whatever for your credit card processing. Maybe I'm just frugal, but these services work out to cost around 10% of each sale. If you write your own DRM and have some PHP scripts deal directly with the Merchant Card accounts like Costco or Pro Service International, then you pay around 5%. (Your games are probably more complicated to write then this DRM stuff/credit card stuff.) Make that 5% for yourself!

Business Tip # 391: Avoid those middlemen!

(I posted this on another thread, but if you missed it...)

Tom

[electronicStar]

If you write your own DRM and have some PHP scripts deal directly with the Merchant Card accounts like Costco or Pro Service International, then you pay around 5%. (Your games are probably more complicated to write then this DRM stuff/credit card stuff.) Make that 5% for yourself!
Because if you don't have any previous knowledge of this kind of things and how they work, it can be very risky, with possible legal problems and loss of money. I wouldn't want to deal with that at the beginning of my business, I have already enough things to manage with the code and the marketing side.
That's how I imagine it anyway.

[Robert Cummings]

I would like to hear from people who don't use the "usual suspects" like bmt and so on, and deliver their own products based off a merchant processor with a much lower fee?

[digriz]

Don't forget some of these services provide more than just a payment processor service. Some, for instance, like eSellerate provide sdk's for keygens and other such things.

Fair enough 10% of a cut from your sales is quite high, but consider how much time or cost it would take for you to develop or buy these systems yourself.

[Nikster]

and 10% of nothing is nothing ;) so for me, no big deal :D