I just signed up for PayPal’s new Micropayments. PayPal seems to be rolling this out slowly as you have to sign-up and then you will be notified in 2 days if you are accepted or not. In theory it should save us a couple pennies every-time we sell a copy of Mini-Compressor. The fixed cost per transaction is reduced from $0.30 to $0.05 but the percentage cost goes up from 2.9% to 5%.
If we are accepted I’ll post the before and after fees. Actually, why don’t I tell you the current fees now. For each copy of Mini-Compressor sold $0.52 to $0.59 goes to PayPal. The amount changes depending if the customer has to pay GST (i.e. lives in Canada), the location of the customer (non USA and Canadian customers have a cross-boarder fee), and a possible currency conversion fee. You can see a list of PayPal fees here. Micropayments, as far as I can tell, still has all the fees listed above but with different rates.
So currently about 7% of each sale goes to PayPal. With Micropayments this will hopefully drop to about 5.5% which is about $0.43. It’s only a savings of ten cents or so but over time that can add up.