A majority of my sales are from US customers buying in USD.

With PayPal, fees are: 3.7% + $0.30 USD

With Stripe, fees are: 2.9% + $0.30 CAD + 0.6% (international card charge) + 2.0% (currency conversion fee)

If you're a Canadian merchant, you can add a USD bank account to avoid the 2% currency conversion fee. This bank account can either be with a Canadian bank, or a US bank.

Source: I work at Stripe, but in addition to that, previously started a Canadian company using Stripe, and like you did mostly payments to US customers in USD. I had deposits directly into both a USD bank account held at a Canadian bank as well as a USD bank account held at a US bank, and did not pay the 2% conversion fee. I actually never received CAD directly at all.

More details: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts

But yes, other than certain exceptions such as this one, getting payouts in non-local currencies on Stripe is limited, and we're working on improving that.

(edit: This assumes you have expenses in USD, or a cheap way to convert USD to CAD, to avoid a ~2% fee from your bank on the conversion. Personally I've used Interactive Brokers which charges 0.002% for USD/CAD conversions.)

To add to Ken's comment, you can add a USD bank account (in addition to your CAD account) in your dashboard settings and your USD transactions will settle into USD without any conversion fees. If you click on 'Add bank account' in the payouts tab [0], there's an option to add a USD account. CAD transactions will automatically settle in the CAD account associated with Stripe. USD transactions will automatically settle in your USD account associated with Stripe.

[0]https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payouts

Source: I work at Stripe

Wow, so expensive either way. European card processing is around 1.7% from what I’ve seen. American banks are atrocious. Is the Federal Reserve rate responsible for this.

American banks also take forever to transfer payments, which drives me mad. There is this massive amount of money just in limbo, a sort of shush cash pile, which the banks make interest off of while the owners of the money fume waiting for permission to use their own money. Grr. /rant

>Is the Federal Reserve rate responsible for this.

No, it’s caused by the fact that I get a minimum of 2.625% cash back on all purchases, and actually 5.25% on all online and most of my other purchases with credit cards.