You can do a bit better with a merchant account. Both merchant accounts and Paypal tend to be skeptical of pre-payment arrangements, since they don't make nearly enough off of you to absorb the risk of you taking the money and running.
That said, 4% is cheap and it will go down as you process more orders. (The magic number is $3,000 per month to get your first .4% knocked off, and there is a sliding scale after that.) Note that it takes rather a lot of effort to get as far as $3k a month relative to what it takes to sell $12 worth of marginal product, which suggests to me that your time is better spent elsewhere, unless you are selling a product which has intrinsically low margins. For those of us in software or SAAS Paypal is pretty much the only cost we have to pay out of our last dollar in sales every month.
See also their micropayments option, which is not advertised but costs 5 cents and 5%. The inflection point is at $12 transactions.
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You can do a bit better with a merchant account. Both merchant accounts and Paypal tend to be skeptical of pre-payment arrangements, since they don't make nearly enough off of you to absorb the risk of you taking the money and running.
That said, 4% is cheap and it will go down as you process more orders. (The magic number is $3,000 per month to get your first .4% knocked off, and there is a sliding scale after that.) Note that it takes rather a lot of effort to get as far as $3k a month relative to what it takes to sell $12 worth of marginal product, which suggests to me that your time is better spent elsewhere, unless you are selling a product which has intrinsically low margins. For those of us in software or SAAS Paypal is pretty much the only cost we have to pay out of our last dollar in sales every month.
See also their micropayments option, which is not advertised but costs 5 cents and 5%. The inflection point is at $12 transactions.