Who loves looking over their payment processing rates?
Researching and trying to find a payment processor who will give you fair rates is labor intensive and tiring.
As tempting as it is to focus your attention only on your percentages, or just one price point. It’s important to figure your total costs when selecting a payment processor to service your business.
Here are some overlooked price points merchants should not not ignore when looking at processing rates.
A common misconception about payments processing is that your percentage costs are the most expensive costs. If you have lots of small ticket items and tend to run smaller transactions, you need to watch out for what your per-transaction fees are. Because they can add up quickly if you are mainly running small ticket items.
Service fees are your basic consistent fee that you every statement. This is basically a charge for using their service allowing you to process the credit cards through their payment gateway. It can vary from company to company, so take it into consideration when looking at different processors.
This is a once a year fee for reviewing your business to make sure you are practicing PCI compliance properly. It’s making sure your business is handling cardholder information securely.
Batch fees are applied each time a merchant submits their list of transactions to process. Every time you submit your transactions to be processed by your processor, you’ll see a small charge.
This fee is standard enough that we wanted to cover it, but it is also the only fee on this list that is completely avoidable! The PCI non-compliance fee is a monthly fine that you’ll see on your statement if your business is not keeping customer credit card information secure. The easiest way to avoid this fee is to call your processor and ask how you can make your business PCI Compliant.
A final thought on calculating costs, when you’re searching for a payment processing provider, it’s important to not get caught up in only one price point.
All costs need to be taken into consideration. Don’t ignore per-transaction fee, or gateway fees. Especially don’t fixate only on your percentage rates.
Read about the success these merchants had with their credit card processing.
