You seriously underestimate the infrastructure, availability and security implications of `counting money electronically'.

Give me $1M and I wouldn't blink at $30K expense.

If your margin is 10% you would.

You can't get that on credit cards, period. The issuing banks charge more than that; anyone offering that is losing money on every payment - way beyond what you could make up for with volume. Even by becoming an acquiring bank and eliminating every single middle-man possible you can't get CC rates that good.

We (WePay) offer 1%+50c for ACH, and we can probably knock it down if you have reasonable volume. Ping me if you want more info, or just check out the website.

Thanks for the pointer; That is a completely valid instance of being a shill. :)

We'll take a look when appropriate. Naturally, it will only make sense if we can either forbid CC's, or explicitly charge higher for the CC payments. (Basically, the customers have to be willing to choose their payment method, and be charged for their chosen method.)

You can require ACH payments and block CCs both with our invoicing tools and over our API. You can also have the customer pay the service fee, rather than eat it yourself. The only thing you can't do is split the cost depending on the payment method (i.e. I'll eat the 1% ACH fee but if you want to pay by CC you're going to pay the extra 1.9%), though we've had some of our API customers ask for that kind of thing and are considering it.

That rate is impossible since the average interchange rate is significantly higher.

Agree. Interchange is generally around 1.8% for US merchants, but I agree with tesmar2 that 2.9% will seem a bit high to many merchants.