All over the web, services that were once costly and complicated have been radically simplified and made drastically cheaper.
Take email marketing. Used to be expensive and complex. Now, it costs just a few dollars a month thanks to pioneers like Mailchimp.
Same goes for online storage and Dropbox.
Now, a US startup wants to do the same for card payments online.
PayStand lets merchants accept multiple payment options for a fixed monthly subscription. There are no transactions fees to the merchant.
The firm reckons smaller businesses could make huge savings this way. It says a business turning over $200,000 could pay out up to $10,000 in card fees.
With PayStand it would pay between $600 a $1200 a year.
Customers can get started in under five minutes via a drag and drop dashboard. They move pics, videos and descriptions of goods for sale and then add a checkout and description.
Once that is set up, they can use a simple embed code to incorporate the page on their own web site/social media page. Just like embedding YouTube or similar.
PayStand has been in a closed beta since 2013, and has already signed up thousands of merchants. It will go live first in the US, with international markets targeted in 2015.
Jeremy Almond, CEO and founder, PayStand told Mobile Money Revolution: “Today’s card payment set-up is all wrong for the internet. It’s slow and very expensive for the retailer.
“Other digital services are almost instant and support affordable fixed pricing, so why not payments?
“We’re trying to re-think payments and remember that the customer doesn’t belong to the payments service provider, but to the merchant.”
The PayStand system accepts all payment cards and also newer services such as Dwolla and even Bitcoin.
It costs between $49 and $299 a month flat fee.
The company’s $1m seed funding came via Cervin Ventures, Serra Ventures, Central Coast Angels, and TiE LaunchPad.