I see a lot of comparisons to Stripe. While I'm sure this API has it's warts, the reasons for it to exist center around cost and control. At a certain scale, companies want the lower cost and higher control associated with having their own merchant account.
Cost: Stripe's 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, if you do enough transactions per month, is very high. How much better you can do depends on some variables like average transaction size, debit/credit mix, etc. You can easily shave it down to around 1.9% in most cases, or better. Again, at a certain scale, giving up 1% or more of your incoming revenue just isn't smart.
Control: Lots of areas here. Removing "STRIPE" from the charge listing on the customer's credit card statement. Direct control of chargebacks. Routing to different payment gateways based on card type. Better integration of card-present and online transactions.
You do, of course, lose the advantages that Stripe provides, so your scale would have to be such that replicating that functionality is justified. There are solutions in the middle. Authorize.net, for example, will let you use your own merchant account and pay just for the gateway services. They provide some of benefits/features that you would lose doing it from scratch.
Cost: Stripe's 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, if you do enough transactions per month, is very high. How much better you can do depends on some variables like average transaction size, debit/credit mix, etc. You can easily shave it down to around 1.9% in most cases, or better. Again, at a certain scale, giving up 1% or more of your incoming revenue just isn't smart.
Control: Lots of areas here. Removing "STRIPE" from the charge listing on the customer's credit card statement. Direct control of chargebacks. Routing to different payment gateways based on card type. Better integration of card-present and online transactions.
You do, of course, lose the advantages that Stripe provides, so your scale would have to be such that replicating that functionality is justified. There are solutions in the middle. Authorize.net, for example, will let you use your own merchant account and pay just for the gateway services. They provide some of benefits/features that you would lose doing it from scratch.