Hey guys,
I wanted to pick the community's brain a bit to find out what preferences are, etc. Right now we're using BMT Micro, which is very popular amongst indie developers, but it seems to irritate a number of European customers. I've done what I can to make that easier over the months, mainly changing it so that the exchange rate values are manually set (and thus fair), as well as recently changing the Fraud Protection to loose instead of strict. These things have helped, but I still don't view these as the optimal scenario, necessarily.
Things I like about BMT:
1. Their royalty rate is excellent (90% to Arcen).
2. I can set up products, or adjust existing products, without having to sign a contract or deal with their staff.
3. They simply send a check at the end of every month, with no transaction fees (as with wire transfers), etc.
4. They are in the US, and actually even in the same state as me, so if legal action ever needed to be taken, it would be simpler comparatively speaking.
5. They handle distribution of purchased license keys without the need for further action from Arcen (a must).
On the downsides:
1. Their order form is more than a bit dated-looking.
2. It asks for a bunch of information that is scary, and that I have no idea why they need to know from customers. And I can't change that.
3. Their exchange rates are not particularly fair in most cases, though I have been able to correct for that by manually setting the values.
So. Anyone else have any favorite payment processors out there? I can look into them, at least. Indie sites and forums list a variety of payment processors, but BMT tends to win because of the royalty rate. Honestly, I feel like that is even on the high side, I am not sure what they do that deserves even 10%. Going with a partner like Paypal makes it so that the rate is more like 3% I think, which is close to the Merchant Rate for credit cards in general, so that's about as low as you go. However, Paypal doesn't distribute license keys, or they didn't the last time that I looked. And, people without paypal then tend to complain about it when paypal is the only purchase option (so something like BMT where paypal is an option, but not required, tends to be nice).
I've talked to Avangate in the past, but their royalty rate isn't quite as good, and they're located outside the country, which requires wire transfers, etc. They might be a better option in general, but it seems like there ought to be an even better solution that is simple, affordable, and just handles it right. Paypal would honestly be really attractive to me if they distributed license keys, for those reasons.
Anyway -- thoughts?
