We take a quick look at Braintree Payments, a Chicago-based payment processor, to highlight some of the features a merchant should look for when selecting a payment processor.
Braintree is now one of the most popular payment solutions on the market, with a wide range of tools for business owners. The company has offices worldwide and caters to both small business owners and corporate executives. Despite its size, however, Braintree continues to prioritize ecommerce businesses.
Braintree currently provides merchants with two options for using its services. A Braintree merchant account, which includes payment gateway access, is the most popular and cost-effective option. You’ll receive a fully active merchant account that has been professionally overwritten and is extremely stable. Most PSPs, such as Stripe and Square, do not provide the same level of stability. There are no account fees or early termination fees, and billing is done every month.
For its merchant account, Braintree offers flat-rate pricing and interchange-plus pricing. You can also sign up for the payment gateway and integrate it into your existing merchant account using an API. This may be a more cost-effective option, but it isn’t always the best option. The gateway fee is quite high, and transaction fees are added on top of that.
Although Braintree is a good option for many merchants, it can only accept around 144 different currencies, making it a poor choice for international ecommerce.
Braintree Reviews: Overview
A substantial amount of money backs Braintree. PayPal paid $800 billion for Braintree Payments in 2013, claiming that their products and development platforms were “complementary.” PayPal was interested in Venmo, a PayPal competitor (see our complete Venmo review here). Braintree purchased Venmo in 2007. Venmo allows consumers to send money to each other for free using an email address or a mobile phone number.
Braintree was founded in 2007 and received $69 in venture capital funding early on, demonstrating its potential. Airbnb, Fab, LivingSocial, Uber, Twilio, and GitHub are among the companies that use the platform. In 2013, Braintree processed $12 billion in payments, with $4 billion coming from mobile devices, demonstrating the company’s widespread adoption of mobile payments.
Braintree review: Pros and Cons
Finally, Braintree is a good parent company to consider if you’re running a business model in the United States and need to manage online and offline payments. The processing fee and flat-rate pricing are simple to budget for, and the user interface is excellent. You also have a large selection of integrations to choose from. However, if you only require a gateway, this may not be the best option.
Pros
- There are a lot of great features.
- Customize your user interface.
- Backend access for developers
- A wide variety of payment options are available.
- Options for several currencies
- Predictable, flat-rate pricing
- Simple to use functionality
Cons
- Not the best solution if you only need a gateway.
- Industries that pose a high risk are not supported.
- Account setup takes a long time.
Review of Braintree’s Pricing
While some experts have criticized Braintree’s pricing, it is comparable to Stripe. There are no hidden charges in the prices listed below; there are no setup or monthly maintenance fees.
- Per transaction, 2.9 per cent plus $0.30
- Each chargeback costs $15.
You can accept any consumer payment, from American Express to PayPal, and the money will be instantly transferred to your bank account. Braintree has no yearly or monthly account fees if you run an eCommerce site.
There are no monthly minimums to meet, and there are no additional expenses for customer assistance. There are no fees for PCI compliance, early termination, gateways, or statements.
The only additional costs you’ll have to consider are when your customers buy something from another country. A 1% fee is applied to transactions made on cards issued outside of the United States, and an extra 1% fee is applied to transactions made on cards issued outside of the United States.
When you consider that there are no additional costs to worry about, Braintree’s rate of roughly 2.9 per cent + $0.30 is competitive. Remember that if you’ve merged with PayPal, you’ll also have to consider their rates. It’s also worth mentioning that there are volume discounts available for businesses that accept a large number of payments and a discounted fee for organizations.
You can convert to a custom pricing plan if your organization processes $80,000 each month. You have more flexibility with interchange or flat-rate pricing options, but interchange plus is likely the more economical option. Although flat-rate pricing is more predictable, you will almost always pay more for some transactions.
Braintree’s ACH Direct Debit processing is also supported at regular pricing of around 0.75 per cent every transaction. The maximum cost per transaction is also restricted to $5. If you’re prepared to pay the costs, you can get Braintree’s payment gateway on its own.
The gateway is compatible with the majority of merchant accounts available in the United States, although there are a few fees to consider:
- Monthly gateway costs are $49
- Per transaction, $0.10 (on top of processing rates from your provider)
- Each additional account costs $10 per month.
Although these costs are competitive, the cost of the payment gateway alone typically makes the payment gateway only offering unaffordable. Most merchant service providers charge roughly $25 per month for gateway fees and around $0.05 per transaction for sales completed. As a result, Braintree’s pricing is relatively high. However, Braintree offers several unique advantages, such as a vast API library.
Features of Braintree include:
Braintree specializes in selling digital and mobile products via the internet. Braintree has you covered if you work in eCommerce or use mobile processing. Braintree’s services for business owners are divided into two categories: merchant accounts and payment gateway services.
You get a full-service solution with a unique ID number, outstanding account stability, and a fantastic set of features if you choose the merchant account. There are no minimum processing requirements, which is ideal for small businesses.
If you choose the payment gateway services, Braintree will provide you with everything you may need in addition to payment processing. You can utilize the Braintree gateway with another provider’s merchant account. On the other hand, per-transaction and gateway costs are nearly twice as costly as the national average.
The following are some of Braintree’s services:
Braintree direct: Designed for businesses that want to sell products directly from their website or mobile app. You can accept debit and credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and wallets as payment methods. Fraud prevention, reporting, integration options, and recurring billing are also available.
Using Braintree Extend, merchants can exchange payment data with their partners, such as other merchants, platforms, and service providers. Security services, vault providers, loyalty partners, and incentive partners can all extend to share data. In-context solutions with purchasing opportunities in partner content can also be developed.
You can handle many parts of your business on the Braintree marketplace. You can split your payments between yourself and your providers, but determine how much this service costs.
Braintree Auth: This product is designed for third-party providers rather than merchants, although you can use it if you utilize a third-party service for data analytics, recurring billing, invoicing, and other services. Auth is a great approach to safely communicating merchant data.
Take a Test Drive in Braintree
Anyone can create an account to explore how the interface works in the sandbox. Except for an email address, there’s nothing to give away. It does not process total payments because it is a sandbox.
Services and Products
If a customer requests one, Braintree will set up a merchant account for them. As a result, there is no need to pay a bank. Braintree also provides the following products and services, among others:
Customer payment data is secured and stored in a credit card vault. The option to extract saved credit card information would make it easier for a merchant to transfer payment processors if necessary. Customers can change their payment information using ecommerce engines connected to that.
Recurring billing–keeping client data in the vault makes it easier to collect subscriptions, gifts, SaaS fees, and other recurring payments.
Mobile–works with the ecommerce partners’ mobile apps listed below.
Merchants can also use their SDKs to create their payment buttons and apps for iOS and Android.
Merchants in the United States, Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand can use it. The system supports 130 currencies.
Payment gateway–since you’re reading this, they provide a payment gateway.
In-store payments: Braintree is primarily designed for eCommerce purposes. On the other hand, PayPal can be used to accept payments in person. Braintree works with all mobile point-of-sale apps and suppliers. You can also accept verified payments at checkout in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. You will, however, have to pay PayPal’s company costs.
Sandbox: Aside from accessing credit card payments and debit card transactions, another option to take benefit of Braintree is to experiment with its capabilities as a developer. There is a sandbox feature that allows you to experiment with Braintree.
Payouts: You may use Hyperwallet to access marketplace business payouts and make mass payments from your Braintree account to all merchants selling on your platform.
Data security: You should constantly check to see if your payment solution can protect you from fraud or damage. From authorize.net to braintreepayments.com, every major credit card processing service includes security for all users, and Braintree is also PCI DSS compliant.
Reporting: You can keep track of how many transactions you process on business days using reporting options. You might look at customer reviews and see if your sales drop due to incidents like Covid. You might also see whether you’re making more sales with euro or dollar prices to see where your clients are.
Braintree Review: Extra Features
Braintree’s list of accessible capabilities is growing, with everything from fraud protection to reports to help you track credit card transactions. You have the option of creating a bespoke user interface for yourself and your employees.
You’ll also get Global Selling Support, which will allow you to accept payments in over 130 different currencies.
If you’re selling overseas, you can use various settlement and “present” businesses, which allows you to display the currency that your buyer is used to while still accepting the payments that are appropriate for you. You also get in-depth fraud protection features for your monthly subscription, ensuring that you won’t have to jeopardize your great reviews or hire a specialized risk team.
Braintree also provides a high level of data portability, with a vaulting mechanism that lets you access client payment information while complying with PC regulations. You’ll be able to enhance your shopping cart and other features with integrations to third-party applications to access extra capabilities.
Braintree Reviews: PCI Compliance
When a customer opens a merchant account with Braintree Reviews, the account is transferred to SecurityMetrics. By providing the mandatory annual survey, they assist Braintree customers in obtaining and maintaining PCI Compliance.
According to Braintree, customers can create transactions “without the PCI compliance overhead that comes with handling unencrypted data,” according to Braintree. PCI compliance is required of any merchant who accepts credit cards. On the other hand, other kinds of payment do not require this. Even with EMV chips, PCI-compliant credit cards and POS are not the ideal security solution because they do not support end-to-end encryption.
Braintree Reviews: Payment Methods
Braintree supports all of the payment options listed below. Because it is not a traditional point-of-sale system, cash is not one of them:
- PayPal
- Credit cards
- Venmo
- Apple Pay
- Android Pay
- Bitcoin, via the Coinbase exchange
Braintree Reviews: Other Tools
Fraud Tool–aids in the prevention of chargebacks. Because there are various to pick from basic, advanced, or integration with the Kount cloud service, they are not instantly added to the customer’s account (for a fee).
Webhooks–instead of needing the merchant to check for certain occurrences in the payment gateway, webhooks send notifications to the merchant. Subscription modifications, disbursements from the merchant’s account, contested transactions, and changes in the status of sub-merchant accounts are all examples. Send a POST to a URL on your site behaves like a function callback in event-driven programming. As a result, the merchant can send such information to any other programme.
Braintree Reviews: Developer Tools
There are three possibilities:
- Merchants can use the SDKs listed below to integrate Braintree into their ecommerce site.
- Use the Magento Braintree Payments plugin. That will necessitate some PHP coding.
- Choose an eCommerce platform that already has Braintree integrated. These are listed below under Partners.
According to Braintree, developers can start a transaction with as small as “ten lines of code,” according to Braintree. Here are three Ruby lines.
The platforms that are supported are listed below. The client is a type of data used in mobile apps or web pages. Your ecommerce engine’s backend processing will be integrated with the server.
client: iOS, HTML/JavaScript, Android
server: Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js, Java .NET
Companies without in-house programmers can reach out to any of the following Braintree partners for assistance with the Braintree integration:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- WooCommerce
- CoreCommerce
- Easy Digital Downloads
- FreshBooks
- ShopSite
- Fleapay
- Wufoo
Braintree Reviews: Support
The usefulness of Braintree support’s knowledge base is generally determined by how easy it is to look up information. They pay for the Google Custom Search Engine for their site so that you may locate what you’re looking for.
Support agents are available from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. CST, except on Fridays, when they are available from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST. If a merchant starts a ticket after hours, they can react to a prompt to page an agent using the emergency request form.
If a merchant suspects that the payment platform is down, they should check the system status page to see if there is a widespread outage in their area.
Braintree Reviews: Security
This is important to highlight because even PayPal does not include it:
Authentication with two factors. Because logging in requires a cellphone-generated token, if a hacker gets a password, they won’t be able to log in because they won’t have the cellphone.
