In the current and post COVID era, consumers demand fewer people interactions and more convenient ways to order, pay, and pick up items. All over town, we see signs with phone numbers encouraging customers to call in orders. But even the phone is time-consuming for consumers getting busy signals and time-consuming for merchants who have to pay staff to answer the phone. Time is money.
In a previous blog, we talked about Scam #1, the Fraud of Lack of Disclosure. Some merchant processing salespeople leave out significant rates and fees in their quotes. If you haven’t read that blog, click here. A second scam that processors commit against merchants is the scam of raising rates. Their salespeople don’t mention this to their prospects. Embedded in the 30 page, small print,
How Can I Reduce My Credit Card Processing Fees? 1. You can reduce your rates by swiping a card versus keying it into a terminal or virtual terminal or online at an eCommerce site. When the card is swiped and present, the chances of a chargeback are lower. Therefore, the bank issuing card associations assign a lower rate to that swiped card than to a
One of our merchants recently tried to run a $480,000 transaction! It got declined at the terminal. They had run $200,000 transactions before, but this new one wouldn’t go through! So why not? Doesn’t the processor want that amount of money running through their coffers? Not necessarily, here is the story. Credit card processing companies assume the risk of chargebacks if the merchant does not
Let me educate you so you, too, can avoid getting sucked into a contract from a scammer salesman. There are three determinations of the fees for accepting credit cards: the interchange cost, the brand fees, and the processor’s surcharge. a. The interchange cost. This is the rate and transaction fee set by the bank associations to collect “interest” on the money “loaned” to the cardholder
Tiered Pricing With this pricing format, the processor throws all transactions into three buckets with only three rates. Generally, one bucket is for swiped transactions, one for keyed transactions and rewards cards, and a third for business cards or keyed-in rewards cards. The buckets are called qualified, mid-qualified, and non-qualified. This pricing system allows for an easy to understand merchant statement because there are only
During the COVID epidemic, and because of the concerns to maintain social distancing, consumers are looking for new ways to shop, purchase, and pay for the things they want to buy. Consumers want to order online, pick up items, without getting out of their car, and they want a seamless way to use digital payment processing without having to pull their credit cards out of
The famous Soda Pop Game is played with a POS system, by splitting tickets. Only instead of splitting the cost between two people at a table, the drinks are split off to an open ticket. This server theft works when patrons are paying with cash. Let’s say Table #1 orders two meals and two sodas. Before the server presents the ticket, he casually asks whether
Invariably, at some point, you have to call your 1-800 technical support number for your credit card terminal. It shouldn’t suck up an hour of your time but it can. And time is money, especially when your terminal is down, people can’t pay you and they start walking out the door! Below is a typical scenario which you want to avoid and below that are
It used to be cheaper to take pin debit cards via the debit networks instead of through the credit card interchange networks. That means that you would take the card and the customer would enter his pin number. The debit networks are Pulse, Maestro, Interline, Jeanie, NYCE, Star and others. But since the Dodd Frank Act, it is cheaper to take debit cards just
Only pay fees on debit card processing.
$0.00 transaction fee on credit card processing
