... which is a fairly terrible percentage rate. Even a small processor should be able to get under 2%, provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks.
There's a tremendous amount of froth in those rates.
2% is below CNP interchange on a lot of card types. For example, it costs the processor 2.95% to charge a Platinum MasterCard or 2.05% to charge a World MasterCard card as CNP. A processor charging less than interchange is taking a loss; it's paying the merchant more than it'll get funded by charging that card.
The flat-rate pricing these new aggregators offer at 2.7-2.9% already builds in taking a loss on some cards by making it up on ones with cheaper interchange rates. To go below 2% flat rate and make a profit is near impossible. The only place you'll find that is somewhere like PayPal, with $100k/mo or more in volume and a negotiated contract, and they can get away with 1.9% because many of their payments are balance-funded or ACH-funded at nearly no cost.
2.2-2.5% is much more realistic and you'll still need a minimum monthly volume to get it.
Or we can all set up retail stores and abandon this e-commerce stuff. Rates are much lower when you can swipe a physical card. The real profit-taking is happening in those card readers you can pick up at Staples/BestBuy/etc from Square/PayPal/Intuit/GoCardless where they're collecting 2.7-2.9% and paying half that in interchange.
You would think that MasterCard could charge significantly lower fees on MasterCard transactions since they're, like, MasterCard and all... Clearly, they're not interested in competing based upon price.
provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks.
A large chunk of the costs associated with taking payments is fraud. (see founders at work - Paypal[1]) So assuming you don't have a lot of fraud is wishful thinking at best.
