 Give a big welcome to John Gilbert Hey guys I'm actually pretty new to the words. It's a wordpress space. I don't know about you guys But is anybody here been in the wordpress community for less than a year in this room? Awesome. Okay, so you guys are kind of in my boat to anybody who's been in the wordpress community for longer than five years That's awesome. That's really awesome. So my journey into wordpress started with a nonprofit client that we had You know they had mentioned that they use this e-commerce platform called WooCommerce Which I knew nothing about on a platform called wordpress, which I knew a lot about because I actually I Did a little bit of blogging back in the day on on a it was actually something called blogspot I'm sorry Anywho's so It's so I wanted to find out all I could about WooCommerce because I learned that it's The largest e-commerce platform in the entire world 33% of all websites use wordpress and so I had to learn more about it And so I did a lot of reading I wanted to find out, you know, what kind of e-commerce platforms are on there What kind of software is on there? What kind of merchants use them use it and what kind of resources are available, you know I learned that it's open source so you can really do anything that you could possibly want But I went looking for articles on it and I found, you know, here's the best form builder Here's the here's the best e-commerce platform, but what I could never find is anything about payments There's really no talk about it at all. I saw Stripe at PayPal everywhere It's all a little bit of authorized net, but There's really nothing about payments and To Stripe's credit the reason that there's not a lot of information about credit They made it stupid easy to sign up. It is so incredibly easy to sign up for a Stripe count and get going but Ignorance is bliss, but at the same time If you don't know about the the wider world of payments, you really don't know what you're missing out on Right and that's what I'm hoping to educate people on today. Payments is super complex But there's a few lessons that I can teach people like you like they that could help you make a better decision On the payment provider that you choose and and why you might so what I'm mostly going to talk about is Is price and to do that I'm going to take you back a little bit and I'm going to talk about a couple of things Is a brief history on credit on online transactions How fees are calculated and then once you get an understanding of the components of a transaction You can understand where you can actually find better pricing that's optimized for your business so You got a lot to sit just to make when you build a website you got to find domain Hosting e-commerce platform you got to find all the plugins that you're going to use and usually by the time That you're ready to get your site up and up and running payments as an afterthought So how many people here? actually Use a build their own website or manage their own store Okay, and how many people? Build stores for other people all right so So obviously like a lot of people like to hand off their sites to because to stripe or PayPal because it's it's really easy right you just need an email address and put in your address and plug in a few things and you can hand it off but There are a couple reasons that you should use potentially a couple different payment providers one is because Cost two is because there are payment providers that actually pay you to refer business to them So a lot of people bundle in web hosting that you know They're selling plugins that do certain things But there's actually a lot of money to be made by referring payments as well So so finding the right provider can help you get a little kickback when it when I was watching the development track at word camp Miami last Just a few just a month ago You know I saw Chris lemma and Jesse talking about and and Joe Casaboni talking about side hustles You know what can you do to make a little extra money? Well, you can you can sell courses, you know You can bundle in web hosting bundle in site maintenance and so forth But one of the easiest things is right before your eyes just recommending a payment partner can you can get a little piece Of every little transaction there so I just wanted to bring that to people's attention and we'll come around to this as well and We may get a little kind of into the weeds here So if you know if Your eyes are kind of rolling back at all just raise your hand you guys can ask questions We don't need to ask you don't need to wait to the end just raise your hand I'll answer your questions right away So first we're gonna talk about just kind of the how credit evolved over the years about 4,000 years ago you had people Farmers who needed seeds to sow so they could get crops and when they didn't have cash on hand Or any kind of denominations of money They they had a one-on-one relationship with a with an institution that read that says hey I'll give you some seeds now, but you got to give me some some extra stuff once your harvest is done, right? So And you know it was about 4,000 years ago. I'm actually what I learned from 23 and me that I'm actually part in the andrithal and I actually would argue that that my ancestors thought of Thought of lending a little bit before that I have to I had to think that one of my great great great great great great Great-grand people was yeah, I'll loan you a rock, but you gotta give me some of that deer, right? so 4,000 years pass or 20,000 years, however you want to calculate not a lot's happened with credit so So I don't know if you guys watched Little House and the Prairie when you were younger, but Pa, he wasn't always cash heavy, he did the best for his family, but he didn't always have cash. And so what he'd do, he'd go to the mercantile and he would set up a charge account, right? And so he'd be able to buy a shovel or whatever and at the end of the month, on credit, this person would, he'd pay off his balance. And there's a one-on-one relationship, the store merchant knew that Pa wasn't going anywhere. He knew where he lived, right? He knew who his kids were and so forth, so there's always some trust, right? And then fast forward to the 1900s, you know, post-World War II, there was a big consumer boom, right? The economy was great. Everybody knew that when they started working that they were going to make a little bit more money next year than the year before. Everybody was climbing the ladder, living the American dream. And so credit started to change. Instead of being a B to B type opportunity, you started seeing credit be lent to consumers. And so you had these Bloomingdale cards or your oil cards and eventually an airline card. So these cards would allow you to walk into a store, purchase products and at the end of the month you could pay off your balance, right? So there's, it was a bit of a closed-loop system, but it still worked, you know? And then eventually, this guy named John Biggins got an idea. He was like, okay, so, you know, people have these charge cards in individual stores, but I'm a banker. I own a bank. I have merchants at my bank and I have consumers at my bank, so I'm going to create something called a charge-it card. And so any member of Biggins Bank could essentially attain one of these charge-it cards and use it at one of the merchants who was also a member of the bank and how it happened was at the end of the month, the business would tally up all, you know, all the credits that are due. They would toss them over to Biggins Bank and then Biggins Bank would deduct that from the account. And that was basically the first bank card. They're the first issuer of any kind of card, right? And then payments really took a big change because of this guy right here. Does anyone know who this guy is? No. Close. His name was Frank McNamara. And he was eating at a restaurant one day and forgot his wallet and he was with a bunch of buddies and he got really embarrassed. He had to call his wife and his wife came with the cash and with a checkbook. I don't know what it was, but I'm not doing this again. And so he created what's called the diner's club. And so he got all of his friends, 200 of his friends to pay a $5 annual fee to sign up for this product and allow them to use a charge card at any participating restaurant. And so you could eat all over New York City, eat all the spaghetti that he wanted to. I think that's spaghetti that he's eating and charge it at the end of the month. They had to pay their bills. So it wasn't revolving credit, but it was credit. Then came the car brands. You had Bank AmeriCard. The banks were a little bit limited for a while because they were only able to extend credit to certain regions. And so there's this company called Bank AmeriCard and they had this great idea. They're like, well, we can only extend credit to people in our region, but we just built these rails, essentially, to allow other businesses to accept cards. And so what we're going to do is we're going to be able to license this product out to other banks and let other banks sign merchants and so forth. And they end up getting so many remittances and receipts to tally up that they became too big. And so they end up starting a company called Visa. And so Bank of AmeriCard, Bank of America eventually became Visa. And so you had all these different car brands and they really fueled the innovation. So you had the Diners Club card in 1946. In the 60s, you had the first plastic card. Then you had magnetic strips. Then you had EMV chips. And then you had the mobile wallet in 2008. So these people are really the drivers of innovation. And they're the ones who created, essentially, the network that we all use today. And so to go back a little bit, at the same time, let's look at the first online transactions. The very first online transaction happened in 1972 between Stanford and MIT on something called a RAPNet. Did you guys know what was exchanged on the internet for this transaction? It was actually a gram of weed. The very first thing that was exchanged on the internet was a gram of weed. So there you have it. Which is literally the hardest thing to sell on the internet now today, right? If anyone has friends in that business, it's very hard to get an account. So then you had Jane Snowball. She used something called a video text to order provisions from the store. And the people came and they delivered her the goods and then she made the payment to them. And then, which I think was also hilarious, the very first transaction that ever happened was when someone, the first time that someone actually put their financial information into the internet and bought something was for a Sting CD. I just think that's awesome. And then in 2003, you got WordPress. So that's kind of a little history of online transactions. Today online transactions are ever evolving a little bit more complex. Everybody knows what a website is or an online location. This took place at the storefront, right? And then you have your shopping cart e-commerce platform, which really does the brunt of the work for your transactions, right? It's cataloging your information. It's helping you price your products. It's enabling someone to check out it's saving shipping information, saving customer information. It's doing a ton. Then you got a payment gateway. Payment gateway is what actually authorizes and captures the transaction, okay? So Authorize.net is a payment gateway, hence the name. They authorize, capture. They're also the ones who are encrypting the data. They're the ones who are tokenizing the data so that the merchant can use the customer info again securely so they can call instead of saving a credit card on a spreadsheet or whatever. It's just sharing the customer ID. And so all that information is saved for future use. And then you got an merchant account. People all think that the merchant account and the payment gateway are the same thing. They're not. They're completely different. The merchant account is actually a business account that a business gets in order to deposit funds into their bank account. The merchant account is essentially what allows you... It's who determines what you're paying for transactions, how much money you can actually transact in a month, and what products you can sell. So this is basically how a transaction works. And when I was talking about before, when we're talking about PAH and the merchant and the diner's club card, the entire credit card economy works because there's checks and balances. In order to have a credit card, a consumer needs to go to a card issuing bank and have their credit run. Then you can do your toll. You can process $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, whatever it is. The same rules go for an acquiring bank. So the acquiring banks are who actually give merchants the ability to process funds. And so these card brands, they're setting the rules for both of these organizations to follow. So they're setting the rules for how much the consumers can spend. But they're also saying in order to process funds, you need to have X, Y, and Z done on your website. You also... Only these products and services are allowed and so forth, and so they're setting the rules. When you go on your website, the consumer purchases something with the software. Again, that's doing most of the work. The merchant account and payment gateway are... They're authorizing the transaction. They're basically going, does this card holder have the available funds? Yes, it does. And then the information goes back. And so that's how a transaction works. So now I'm just going to tell you guys about the two players involved for a merchant, essentially. The two different ways that you can accept funds as a business. You basically have a payment aggregator and a merchant account. Does anyone know what a payment aggregator is? Payment aggregator is what Stripe, PayPal, and Square are. And so they're actually not a merchant account. They are software that allows you to accept funds without being a merchant. And so they take a lot of responsibility for you, and they make things very simple. A merchant account, so they have easy sign up, simple to understand rates, they're grateful of volume, and they're ubiquitous. You've seen Stripe everywhere, right? But there's also some caveats with this. When you sign up for a payment aggregator, there's nobody who's checking your website really. You have some very limited business information, and so what it is is Stripe is acting as a very large merchant and they're allowing a bunch of other people to basically borrow their merchant account. It's kind of like the difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting, right? If you're not really worrying about overhead and so forth, you can absolutely get a shared account. A merchant account is a little bit more serious. It's actually like signing up for a business account. So a merchant account provider, they need to, because their acquiring bank has to follow laws. And so when you apply for one, not only do they have to follow Visa Mastercard policies, but they have to follow financial regulations like anti-money laundering laws, the Bank Secrecy Act, the Patriot Act. So they need to make sure that a business who is applying for a merchant account is not wanted. They're not on the OFAC list. They haven't been caught money laundering or so forth. They're also making sure that the website, that they're selling what they're saying they're selling, making sure that if they're opening a t-shirt shop, they're going to check the website that the website's actually selling t-shirts and not guns or drugs, right? And so generally when you're applying for a merchant account, you need to be able to supply your driver's license, your business license, and they're also going to make sure that you have terms and conditions on your website, a refund policy, and so forth. So it's a little bit extra work, but there's a one-on-one relationship. There's some trust here. And so the merchant account provider understands your business. They understand the volume that they need. And so what they can also do is give you a bigger amount of volume to process per month. So usually with Stripe, they're throwing a bunch of people under the account knowing that 70% of their customers aren't going to process. And then when certain customers start to spike in volume, they may hold their funds and say, okay, okay, okay, you just processed $15,000 in a month. We need to hold your funds for a week, and we're going to ask you some additional information. So they do the underwriting a little bit later. So if you have a serious business, you're going to do some volume, it probably behooves you to take care of these underwriting questions beforehand. But merchant providers also have more advanced reporting, like being able to chain multiple companies to one account, hierarchical access for reporting, and affiliate programs. Yes? When you say customized rates, there are a certain circumstance, piggyback organizational rates that's already been negotiated with that bank or all banks or that credit provider. So the difference between 2.25% by and maybe 1.70% in some cases, you can negotiate it. Absolutely. Yes, you can negotiate. Like with your phone company or with your internet provider, you know that if you call them enough, you can get your rates lowered down. And generally, banks, they have negotiated ranks with merchant providers, and so someone who does, in a web designer, can do the same thing. They can sign up for an affiliate program with an acquiring bank and say, I want to offer this pricing to my customers and then usually have agreed upon rate and you offer that to your customers. And so the difference between the fees here is that when you're using someone like Stripe or PayPal or Square, they have car brand fees to pay. They have dues and assessments to pay. They have merchant acquire fees and gateway fees, but they're taking all these fees and then they're just charging you one flat easy to understand rate. And so if you're doing very low volume, it's nice to know that if I do $100 transaction, it's going to cost the same. Every single time I do, it doesn't matter what card types I accept. But the car brand fees are actually the most dynamic. So everybody has a debit card in their wallet, I'm sure. Everybody has an airlines card and maybe some of you guys have a corporate card. Debit cards actually cost 0.05% and 20 cents for processors like us to process. These signature debit cards cost 1.65%. And so the actual pricing methodology that you use can determines how you pay these rates or if you actually pay these rates and I'll go a little more detail in a second. With a merchant account, generally you're paying these four rates separately. You're getting billed for everything as opposed to all at once. One of the examples I use, and I'll get to this later, is it's like basically eating at a salad bar. So pricing methodologies, just to kind of get past the last bit of boring stuff here. Flat rate pricing, you guys all know what that is, 2.930 cents. Merchant providers can also offer this pricing too, but if you're going to go through the work and get a merchant account, you should actually do what's called interchange plus pricing, which is kind of like wholesale pricing. You're getting charged for everything separately and there's some thresholds that you can use to actually help you decide whether this is a good decision for your business or not. So whether flat rate pricing or interchange plus pricing, there are a couple different variables that come into play. It's who your customers are, how much volume are you running on your account, and also maybe how much volume you need and what you're selling. So with Stripe, they're paying, or with most merchant providers, they're paying you what's called a discount rate, which is basically, essentially, it's how much the card cost, and so Stripe gives you a discount rate of 2.9%, no matter what the card type is, 2.9% every single time. And then they also charge you a per transaction or an authorization fee, so every time you authorize a card, they're charging you 30 cents plus 2.9% times the transaction amount. So if we look here, this is a $100 transaction with Stripe or PayPal. As you can see here, these are all the different card brands right here, or I took this chart basically from Visa Mastercard and discovered these are the most common card types used on B to C transactions. As you can see here, they're what's called interchange fees. This is the card, this is how much Visa Mastercard, these card issuers are charging for the card. So world elite cards, as you can imagine, big money. You need to have a special kind of credit to have one of these cards, but usually those transactions are a lot larger too. Rewards cards, right? If you ever wondered how you're getting your airline miles, your merchant's paying for that actually, so you're welcome. And then you also got Visa Durban and Mastercard debits, so these are just like, these are the cards that are connected directly to your bank account, right? Everybody has one of these from their local credit union, and this is what's really interesting. So look how much, there's quite a bit of variance between these card types, right? But if you're with Stripe or PayPal, it doesn't matter what kind of card type you're getting charged. It's $3.20 for every single $100 transaction, right? It doesn't matter if the card costs 0.05%, you know, 1.65% or whatever, you're getting charged the same rate. Conversely, if you're with a merchant provider, what they're going to do is they're going to say, you have to pay whatever the card type is, you have to pay the dues and assessments, which is basically the cost of the rails, right? The network that's actually being provided for people and also helping the research and development for new products and services like EMV and stuff. But what they're going to do is, they're going to quote you with something called Interchange Plus, and so the plus is what the markup is over interchange. So usually, a merchant provider will say, we're going to charge you interchange plus a half a percent, which means whatever wholesale cost of the card and the dues and assessments, you're going to pay plus the same markup. And so your transaction cost looks like this. Now, this information really doesn't mean a whole lot if it isn't put into context because how do you know which cards are actually the most prevalent? Visa MasterCard, Visa Debit, if you're selling a product that costs under $100, 70% of all transactions are Visa Debit cards. So 70% of all B to C transactions are on debit card and they cost less than a percent to process. So a lot of it depends on who you're selling to, right? Business cards cost a little bit more as we can see here. So if you're selling direct to businesses, there's also certain things you can do to lower those costs as well. And so what you need to figure out as a merchant is merchant providers, they have some set fees, right? They have usually a monthly fee, a PCI fee, a gateway fee. Some may roll them all into one, but you can probably pay $10 a month or $35 a month in fixed costs. Those are monthly costs above the transaction. So where's that break-even point here, right? Well, generally, when you're working with a merchant provider with interchange plus pricing, your average transaction is going to be around 2.1 to 2.3%. So it's really just a math equation now. So if I know I'm getting a 0.8% discount on all these transactions, how much volume do I need to run to offset the cost of those fixed fees, like the gateway fees and so forth? And again, this is just a chart to kind of show you the prevalence of debit cards, which are insanely cheap to process, and also the future of cards. In the past 14 years, debit has raised 371% for MasterCard, 600% for Discover, and 200% for Visa. So debit cards are super prevalent. They're getting more prevalent, and they're really cheap to process. So that's really all I'm trying to show you guys here. And so here's basically using the same data. Here's basically kind of the break-even points here. So if you're with a merchant provider and you're running $0 a month, well, you have costs. And so payment aggregators can be way cheaper. If you're just running a couple transactions a month, you should be with a payment aggregator, probably if price is really all you're thinking about. There are certain features you can get with a merchant account provider. You can't get with Stripe or with PayPal, but $2,000 a month, you can see here, still a little bit more expensive. But once you start getting around $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, the fixed fees aren't weighted so high now, right? So, and conversely also, if you have merchants who are running $20,000 a month in transactions, a merchant provider is going to be paying you around 0.1% to 0.2% of transactions. So $20,000 merchant can make you anywhere between $40 and $100 a month. And that's just extra cash in your pocket. You're doing them a favor by hooking them up with their provider. So just from a cost perspective, that's kind of a bird's-eye view of payments. So in review, a payment aggregator is a lot like when you go to Whole Foods, right? You're, you know, I just want a meal for myself. I'm going to grab, I'm cool grabbing some lettuce, some chickpeas, some onions and so forth, knowing it's all $7.99 a pound. Like I don't want to buy, you know, a whole thing, a whole head of lettuce, a whole pepper, a whole bottle of olive oil, right? I just want to get a little bit of each, and I'm okay paying a little bit higher fee for every transaction because there's, you know, I don't want to walk away with the entire salad. So, but merchant account is, you know, basically you're making a salad for a family, right? You're not going to hit the salad bar up for $7.99 and get a bunch of chickpeas for your family, you know, when they, when they weigh a ton. So you're going to go buy a head of lettuce, you're going to buy some tomatoes, a green pepper and some olive oil and so forth. So that's really the difference. It's, you know, and there are a lot of great platforms out there, but from a cost perspective, you know, the questions you should really ask yourself in selecting a partner is aside from the cost or, you know, is the provider integrated with the software that I want to use, Stripe or PayPal? They probably are, right? Because they're integrated with everything. Authorized.net's the same thing, too. You know, there's a lot of, they were one of the first to integrate to WordPress and so there's a lot of, a lot of plugins there. What features do they provide, right? When will I receive my deposits? Do you want your deposits in a week or do you want your deposit in a couple of days? Merchant provider is going to give you your money faster because they've already mitigated risk by underwriting your company. So they know the volume that you're going to do. They know what you sell. Some of these payment aggregators, they need to hold money because they don't really know what you're doing for a business. There isn't that, that, that merchant-paw relationship, like, like Little House and the Prairie. They don't know anything about you. What kind of reconciliation reporting is available? Reconciliation reporting is pretty important if you're a nonprofit, right? If you have donations, you want to be able to separate your transaction fees from, from your income, right? And so look for a provider that can provide this reporting for you. Can they work with my business type, right? A lot of, you know, there's what's considered low-risk and high-risk merchants and, and usually the aggregators are not working with the high-risk providers. You hear from a lot of people who are like, oh yeah, I started running CBD on my, selling CBD oil on my site and I was shut down after a week, you know? Well, if you were to apply for a merchant-paw provider, they would just told you no raft of bat or just told you who to contact. So, but, but also, like, do they have an affiliate program? An affiliate program could be beneficial for a couple of different ways. One, it's paying you. But two, they can, you know, a merchant-paw provider is going to be happy for the referrals they're sending you. So they're going to give you a more white-gloved approach. They're going to, if you're working with a merchant authority processing, they can do what's called a cost savings analysis. And so they can see the rates that you're getting and they can cut you a better deal. You know, like a merchant-paw provider, they're thanking you for getting the business. They don't have to advertise. You're bringing it straight to them. And so it's in their best interest to make it as easy as possible to sign up. And before, you know, 10 years ago, it was a pain in the butt to sign up for a merchant account. I'm not going to lie. You had to fax, fax stuff back and forth. It was an ugly process. And one of the reasons that Stripe and PayPal became, you know, such big players so quick is that they made it painless. Well, most merchant account providers have smartened up, and now they have API-based onboarding material. They have, you know, their REST API-based as well. So that's essentially, that's essentially it, guys, in a nutshell. So if you guys have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. I'm still don't know which would be better. I'm a little confused. Yeah, it really depends on your individual business, really. I mean, like, you know, I can't really say which one's better than the other, per se. You know, you want to, it really depends on what you're doing. Did you say earlier if you have a lot of customers Stripe wouldn't be good? If you run a lot of transactions, it's better to do what's called Interchange Plus, which is a more optimized way of paying for, essentially paying for the card types that you're accepting. So yeah, a merchant account provider can definitely be cheaper, you know, if you're crossing that threshold of $5,000 a month, that's, that's the break-even point. Really? Yeah. Just talking about, yeah. Interchange, what? Interchange? Interchange Plus, or Cost Plus pricing. That's like Stripe. That is the opposite of Stripe. Stripe is flat rate. One size fits all pricing. Doesn't matter what card type you say. And Interchange Plus is variable pricing based on the cards that you accept. Jesse. Okay. So as a B2B provider, considering having a cost analysis stuff, right, where you can see. So we have fairly high transaction Stripes, but I'm guessing that a lot of our customers are using rewards cards, such as miles of cards, so it's possible that it might not be in the best interest, in our case, to move over. Do merchant service providers have the ability to look at the types of cards you want to be able to use on Stripe to know? Because I don't know when our customer gives us the credit card, what, if it's a visa debit, or if it's a... Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, so you don't know. And so they're not giving you that data, right? Is that just that data exists? Is that something that merchants... So you can't... So usually if someone's with authorized.net, like any merchant provider has like this card type, this card type, this card type, you know, Stripe doesn't. And so what we can do is kind of a little detective work. We know the trends, we know like based on what your transaction amount is, and who your customers are, what the mix of cards is. So you're... I would imagine you being an agent. So you're probably accepting a lot of business cards, right? And business cards are inherently much more expensive. Those can cost from 2.2% all the way up to 2.8%. And so... And that's before the markup. So one thing you can do in order to lower these interchanges. So tier four business cards are anything that's... So it's basically the business is approved for $25,000 payments. So just because that is risky, you know, as Visa MasterCard offering someone the ability to run transactions that expensive, they're charging the merchant a much higher rate. But Visa MasterCard discover all these card brands. They're willing to lower that interchange rate if the merchant account provider can pass additional data along the transaction. So they're looking for purchase order number, you know, item weight and so forth. So if you can work with the provider, this is called level two and level three data. So the good merchant providers and the good gateways can pass along this info. And that 2.8 charge goes down to 2.2. So... There's potential. And also, you know, if a merchant account provider wants your account bad enough, they'll just give you a... You know, they'll know that, like, you know, your rate's 2.9, so they've got to beat that. So they'll be like, all right, well, maybe this person just gets, instead of a half percent markup, we're just going to do, you know, 0.25 percent markup. You had a business, say, you know, a ton of business or something. How much negotiation power does the business owner have in saying that the interchanges have? Should you go to the guy? Yeah, exactly. So usually the more volume that you run, you know, the more negotiating power that you have. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the other important thing, right, is having verifiable transaction history. And so the good thing about doing interchange plus is that when you go to your next provider to negotiate your rate, they know all your card types. They can say, okay, now I know what your card type is. And so the good thing about doing interchange plus is that when you go to your next provider to negotiate your rate, they know all your card types. They really know what this is going to cost you. But usually, again, like, the card types are variable, so those are always changing. But the markup is what you're negotiating for. And you definitely have negotiating power. Welcome back. Yep, you can. So I can have a merchant account and I can deal with PayPal and Stripe. Yep. Now the one thing that you just want to make sure of is that it's going to take away some of your volume, right? And so, but, you know, American Express Transactions costs a little bit more. So, you know, if you're paying with Anmax off or Stripe, you know, if you're going to pay with debit card use my merchant account, you know, or something like that. And a lot of people also do PayPal buttons, right? Because PayPal's play money, right? If I have $10 in my PayPal account, I don't want my wife to know I bought a t-shirt, you know, because I was supposed to go to groceries or something. You know, I'm using my PayPal account. So... PayPal charge. 2.9 and 30 cents. If you're using, if you're using a kind of like affiliate account that you said, is there, you have to reveal that to your customer as well? Do you have to... Well, I mean, that's up to you. I mean, like it's the same with like offering web hosting or whatever, you know, like people white label stuff. You usually just say, hey, this is my preferred provider, you know, and like, but make sure that your customer is going to get something out of it, right? It needs to be a win-win-win to work. You don't want just to refer someone, you know, if you have a software company, you know, like, if I'm easy digital downloads, like, you know, I want to partner with a provider and give and send everyone to that provider because I know I'm going to make some money. But like, make it worth their while, too. Give them a low rate that's going to lower their transaction costs. Like you can have a win-win-win scenario. Exactly. Yeah, you can be exactly. Yeah, you're going to find out later your toes. Yeah, and that's another great thing, too, because you have big commerce. They're payment agnostic, right? They just have a bunch of payment providers on there. Pick whatever one you want. You know, then you have someone like Shopify, where they just have Shopify payments now. So they went to a merchant acquirer, they applied for their own acquiring license and became a retail, basically like a retail shop, and so they white-labeled the solution. And if you've ever looked at Shopify's annual statements from the last six years, there was a gigantic jump in revenue, you know, once they got everyone to use their payment service provider. And again, as long as you can make it so that people have the features that they need, and people, a lot of times, I feel, want to be recommended to a solution. They don't want to do all the research themselves. And so, as long as you're solving their problems, right, and helping lowering their fees and giving them the features they need, I think you're okay. What advice would you give or change if instead of a transaction happening once, it's like a recurring transaction? Like, introducing someone every month, you know, like 100 or more dollars for a service? So I would for a policy perspective, never make the recurring payment period longer than a year. That's a big no-no with Visa MasterCard. They don't want to see any kind of they want to see yearly renewals essentially. And then, like, some payment providers can also, you know, they have their own recurring engine, within WooCommerce. My company has a free subscription product that we just give away as a plugin. But if you want to use something like Woo subscriptions or membership manager pro, you know, I want to make sure that, you know, the gateway or the payment partner that you choose is actually integrated to that platform. So, you know, you don't want to, like, get someone set up and then find out that it doesn't even work with the platform that they're using, right? Related to that, so subscriptions, your WordPress.org plugin that people use on WooCommerce does subscriptions. Your version of subscription. Yes. Is there a plan to adapt that to the official Woo subscription because it's also a membership plugin that relates to that? Yes, there absolutely is. And right now, so we have our own merchant account. We're a merchant account provider and a gateway. We've connected to our gateway to the most requested products. We're not connected to everything. But in the case where we're not, you know, connected to what is not a qual pay to software connection, like with Woo subscriptions, you can use Authorize.net to our merchant account. I loved your history of credit card transactions. There's one I suggested you add and that's the great Fresno experiment. Oh. No, I'm not. Without your permission, 60,000 bank americards to the residents of Fresno, California. And within 10 days, it's like 90% of the population of Fresno was only using bank americards. It was insane. That's interesting. Why don't we do that for the whole state of California? If you have an address, you can get a free credit card. There was no credit card. Then they did it in Illinois again. The whole thing just exploded bad. And then I think there was either no ordinances of state laws and saying you could not send a credit card unannounced without a credit stamp. That's hilarious. When I went to college, I got my first bank of americard because I got a free t-shirt. It was like, I still have that credit card today. It's a good job, guys. History of ARPANET? Yeah. I was a user of ARPANET. Really? And thank you for pronouncing it correctly because I certainly wasn't. How do we find a merchant services company to work at the Anchomerical Wells program? Yeah. You just go to the bank? Yeah, go to the bank. We also offer the program as well. Yeah, just look up payment referral program. Again, when you're looking at this stuff, just a word of advice. People who have authorized.net based software, they can sign up for an affiliate program directly with them. I recommend finding the merchant provider first and cut out the middle person because authorized.net is just making a deal with the bank who's then paying them, then they're paying the referral part. You can cut that middle person out. So... Absolutely. Everything's on the table. Yeah. Yeah, work... Your payment provider should be your partner. They should understand what your goals are, what your customers' goals are. Yeah, you are making the money. And also a lot of times, or every single time, actually, an affiliate program, you're getting paid off with the profit. So they don't care if you're charging all getting calculated at the end of the month and so they're splitting you a percentage of the net revenue. So, I mean, they want the business. I mean, obviously, they'd like you to charge as much as possible so there's more revenue to share, but you got a lot of negotiating power. How long it takes in general? Yes. It depends who you're using. Sorry. And it depends on... It depends on who you're using and a lot of times it depends on the process. Some merchant providers will allow you to submit an application without supporting documentation and you can get approved on reserve, which is basically like 100% holdback where you can run transactions but you can't take your money out until you supply those documents because a bank, they need to do due diligence, they need to avoid a check, they need your driver's license, they need your business license and so forth, but good providers can do it as a merchant type. There's a couple that can be... If you're like a vacation club or something and there's a large risk of exposure of charge backs and so forth, that might be a little harder to underwrite because the more confusing your business model is, they want to be able to say, what are your terms and conditions? What happens if someone buys this? They want to make sure that you have if you're trying to get a pyramid, they want to make sure that you're not offering a pyramid scheme and so forth and so there's really just a bunch of checks and balances that you are who you say you are, your business is selling what you should be and also that your your DDA description, the thing that actually shows up on your consumers credit card statements matches up with what your business is, but... And you have a delineator of a minimum amount of transactions of $10 a month Yeah, $4,000, yeah, I'd say, yep, absolutely. Yeah, I mean a lot of time it's a good idea to get your merchant running first, right, because like everybody thinks they're going to run $10,000 a month when they set up their website, right and then what happens so using a payment aggregator like Striper Paypal for those first couple of months really is a good way to kind of because what happens if they run $200 a month or $1500 a month, they don't have to have that monthly fee but then again there's certain providers that have a very low monthly fee like $9.95 that includes everything so it's just kind of what does your customer want, right? Do they want an invoicing solution that comes free with the product? Is that worth $9.95 a month? Is the reporting worth $9.95 a month being able to see, you know, one thing that that's always frustrating me with PayPal is trying to find any kind of transactional data after six months, right? So a merchant provider is going to be able to give you that transactional data and hopefully 30 different filters to find that data, right, by a currency amount, by transaction type, by hard type or so forth, and allow you to find that information a lot easier. What was the $9.95? $9.95? $9.95 What, transaction? So our company charges a $9.95 fee per month for the gateway and the merchant account and the PCI. It doesn't matter how many transactions. All together. What's that? It doesn't matter how many transactions. Nope. That's good. Every once in a while we may not be connected to something and we may need to connect to Authorize.net Well, there's additional $1015 and usually if we're not connected, we'll give you a little bit more of a break on your discount rate just to kind of make up for that. All right. Yeah, thanks guys.