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Um.. PayPal and Stripe.
If you want to avoid Paypal and Stripe, you could look into https://www.hostmerchantservices.com
Ew. Amex be like 100,000,000% interest and like a billion fees. Not worth accepting for a merchant - it's not like anyone uses it anyway...
BUT IS FREEE!!!
You don't pay interest when accepting credit cards. Typically for AMEX it's something like $.39 per transaction + 1.49% of transaction cost, so on a $20 a year account you pay $3.37.
You get 1.49% on AMEX where?
The usual rate even direct is 2-3%. My merchant - one of the largest non-UK EU banks - charges me 2% across all and that is only if i do not take over 10% Amex... (their default rate is 2.9% for AMEX and 1.9% for others).
In the United States it's heavily marketed towards businesses as "business credit", which is aggravating because outside of the United States, it's basically unheard of. Paypal globally accepts it, but trying to get businesses to sign up for a Paypal account to use Amex to pay is generally rebuffed.
That was a guesstimate. I was going to mention that rates can vary, but didn't want to over complicate things
Their credit cards have a WAY higher interest rate for withdrawing for customers. I was just stating how badly overpriced AMEX was.
Amex is hugely popular here in Croatia for private persons (probably 25%), even having promotions in supermarkets to win free travel....
In Austria nearly every business has one as well, mostly as they charge not you but the merchant and refund fairly easy if you complain.
Amex is just not used in Africa and South America, but there even just Mastercard can run you into issues (SA/CA prefers Visa for some reason, in EU MC/Visa is accepted the same but Amex more rarely, about 50% for DE/AT and usually higher end stores).
Yea, that would be extremely low especially with a reasonable transaction fee - 1.49% is reasonable in larger transaction volumes for MC and Visa (not sure about discover and JCB/Chinese, very rare here) though.
Stripe's 2.9% is pretty fair across the board, especially as signup is very simple (much easier than eg. Worldpay).
As in money on ATM? I pay not much with my Mastercards for that (about 5%) but it is bank dependent, EU might also come into play as well as currency conversion (as we have HRK here, not EUR, while my cards are in EUR/USD/HKD).
@William Yep. It's higher than most companies
Also, might be generally interesting on topic - Most larger electronic stores in EU (Mediamarkt, Saturn, Conrad eg.) do not accept any CC at all and only direct debit (Maestro eg.).
This is due to the cost as well, direct debit is nearly free (20c/charge on my bank and no %).
Conventional merchant accounts will probably want you to sign up directly with Amex. Paypal/Stripe/Braintree/Paymill etc. don't.
As for Amex, I have one. It's great for the cardholder but not so good for the merchant. Their whole business model is charging the merchant more to give better rewards to cardholders. We pay about 0.5% for Visa/MC and would pay about 2% for Amex if we wanted to accept it. Easy decision.
In the UK, they're fairly common. In Kazakhstan, they're accepted more widely than Visa/MC somehow. In most other countries (except the US) I've travelled to, they are mostly unheard of.
Richer Russians (not even high end, middle class) did tend to have Amex in the past (pre-US sanctions), so maybe related - Spending in KZ or now using KZ banks to get them.
Might be related that Unicredit/Raiffeisen are generally hesitant to issue cards in Eastern Europe outside the EU (eg. RU, UA).
Some of the card issuers will give a Visa or Mastercard on the same credit account for the places that Amex is not accepted.
Usually it's Amex as the primary on the "rewards" accounts.
There is also Square and the traditional grave robbing Authorize.net.
Makes sense, here you do the card via Amex directly usually though - chance is high that you already have Visa/MC on the account they charge your monthly bill from anyway (or even have them charge from your bank's CC as it might be cheaper monthly installment/interest).
When travelling, we know that we can 100% avoid DCC by using AMEX...