Jean Galea

Health, Wealth & Happiness

  • Start Here
  • Guides
    • Investing in Crypto
    • Real Estate Crowdfunding
  • My Story
  • Blog
    • Cryptoassets
    • P2P Lending
    • Real estate
  • Podcast
  • Search

Braintree vs PayPal Fees, Which One is Cheaper?

Last updated: August 06, 20204 Comments

Note: If you have any questions after reading this and the several other articles relating to PayPal on this site, please leave a comment or contact PayPal directly. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I am unable to offer any advice over email so all emails related to PayPal will remain unanswered.

Update August 2020: I now prefer Stripe over 2Checkout or Braintree. After moving to Stripe I saw a drastic reduction in abandoned carts (from 10% to 1.46%) and a corresponding rise in revenue.

Update June 2018: I have now switched to 2Checkout instead of Braintree. Unfortunately, I had a negative experience with Braintree. They decided to ban our account after receiving just 2 refund requests from a 100 sales, which seems nonsensical to me.

I’ve been using PayPal and Braintree to collect payments for my plugin sales, and I can now do some comparisons in terms of charges. If you have tried to understand the pricing of these payment gateways you will know how complex it is to try and compare them.

The best way I found is to divide the monthly charges by the monthly sales I processed through each processor, and that gives me the percentage cost of using each of these payment gateways.

While Braintree has one price per transaction across the board (on EU transactions, the rate is 1.9% + €0.35. For non-EU transactions, the rate is 2.9% + €0.35.), PayPal lowers the fees as your business grows. So, in the long run, I believe PayPal is the cheaper of the two. Braintree also charges €15 for chargebacks, and keeps all the commissions when you give refunds to your customers.

My average fees for Braintree before they took a percentage point off their pricing (it was 2.9% and 3.9% before) were 4.4% while those for PayPal were 3.8%. They might be close but that 0.6% difference can be important when you start earning more money.

That doesn’t consider the fact that with PayPal I can only withdraw up to $2,500 at a time to my debit card, and there is a 2 Euro charge per withdrawal. Again this adds up and frankly is quite ridiculous. Since my account is based in Malta I can only withdraw to a debit/credit card or to a US bank account which I don’t have.

I will still keep using Braintree as the benefit of offering customers the ability to pay by credit card outweighs the extra cost, but when Stripe becomes available in my country I’ll probably consider a switch if it works out cheaper.

  1. How to Time PayPal Withdrawals to Get the Best Currency Exchange Rate
  2. 🧐 Are You Losing out from PayPal’s Exchange Rates?
  3. 🤔 Which PayPal Account is Best for You?
  4. 💸 Changing Your PayPal Withdrawal Currency
  5. Accepting Credit Card Payments via Braintree in Europe
  6. Braintree vs PayPal Fees, Which One is Cheaper?
  7. 💸 Understanding PayPal Cross Border Fees
  8. PayPal Now Allows Withdrawing Money to Bank Accounts in Malta
  9. 💳 Withdrawing Money From PayPal for Non-US Accounts
  10. Which PayPal E-Commerce Checkout Service Should You Use?
  11. 🤔 Should You Open Separate PayPal Accounts for Each of Your E-Commerce Stores?
  12. 🆚 PayPal VS Wise Borderless
  13. 💳 Linking Virtual Bank Accounts and Cards to PayPal (Revolut, TransferWise etc)
  14. How to Check the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) History in PayPal
  15. PayPal Stiffs Sellers With Changes in Refund Policy
  16. How to Change Ownership of a PayPal Account
  17. How to Buy Bitcoin With PayPal – Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Filed under: Business

Related

About Jean Galea

Jean Galea is a dad, amateur padel player, host of the Mastermind.fm podcast, investor and entrepreneur.

Comments

  1. Dimitar says

    October 31, 2018 at 10:36 pm

    Hey Jean,

    Great write-ups, thanks you. I stumbled upon your articles while looking for a good option for a payment processor for a subscription based web service. I was considering 2CO but read a lot of very negative reviews about them (somewhat common for all payment processors). Would you care to share your experience with them thus far?

    Thanks!

    Reply
  2. Daniel says

    September 22, 2018 at 4:45 am

    Too bad to hear your experience with Braintree. I used them years ago for another e-commerce project with success. They still seem to have very competitive rates and definitely are cheaper for me than 2CO. Stripe and Square and the other options I’m considering in second place. My main requirement is that I need the provider to support multi-currency settlement (not forcing me to convert to a particular currency by default, unless spread on their forex is <0,5%). I evaluated about 20 different processors and these came out on top.

    Reply
  3. Dan Ieromka says

    March 4, 2015 at 10:32 am

    Well, from my experience, it is usually works that way: dependless of commission rate, some clients prefer paying by PayPal, some by Skrill or Bank transfers… by and large you need to keep the client happy and able to pay 🙂

    Reply
    • Jean says

      March 4, 2015 at 10:52 am

      Thanks for sharing Dan and yes I agree with you. The more options the better from a client’s perspective. When selling digital products you certainly have to offer PayPal plus a credit card option, be it Braintree, Stripe or another processor.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords or links in the name field.

Latest Padel Match

Jean Galea

Investor | Dad | Global Citizen | Athlete.

Follow @jeangalea

  • Padel
  • Affiliate Disclaimer
  • Cookies
  • Contact

Copyright © 2021 · Hosted at Kinsta · Built on the Genesis Framework