Credit Card Processing in a Small Business

Kaio

Bronze Knight of the Realm
221
3
The rates being posted here are rather outrageous compared to what we pay (0.89% for debit/credit card transactions using visa/mastercard, 1.65% for visa/mastercard, etc.). We use First Data for most of our card services and it will give you much better rates then paypal or square. Those who find paypal cost competitive are only for online transactions which have a higher rate then face to face physical swipe's of the card. Our e-commerce side of the business pays about 1% more and a higher fixed transaction fee.

We pay about 0.10% over the interchange rates (this is how much the visa/mastercard/etc. really collect, then your card processors charge on top of that) that can for each card and about 10 to 16 cents per transaction (I can remember the percentages but not the fixed transaction fee). The lowest are the debit cards (run through visa or mastercards credit system not using pin) which are about 0.80% so we lose 0.89% and 10-16 cents for the entire transaction on these. The standard mastercard and visa transactions are around 1.55% while rewards versions are about 2.25 percent. Debit cards have been this low since some law was passed early last year I believe).

Just opened a statement for one of our machines. The difference between what we submitted (total sales rung up on the pos) versus what was funded to our bank account was about 1.6 which includes any monthly fee's we may have had. That is 1.6% total spent on credit card processing including bank interchange fee's, card processing transaction, any any monthly fee's.

We use PNC for many stores that have local PNC branches and they do next day funding using First Data for merchant processing (PNC acts like any other reseller of first data).

Edit: Correction in that based on current interchange rates most of our check card transactions (runs through credit systems) we pay about 0.89%)

Here is a link of current visa interchange rates. Most of our card swypes are actually check cards nowadays and the rest are 95% standard visa/mastercard.

http://usa.visa.com/download/merchan...s-june2012.pdf

If you are billing 20K on credit you should lose no more then 1.8% of that money for the entire credit processing if it is not done online.
 

checkyeah_sl

shitlord
70
0
Funny that you mentioned this. I'm building a new business right now that focuses on payment processing. We are building it off of stripe which is $.35 per transaction and 2.9%. Our fees are $15 a month. With that $15 you get the ability to manage your customers, reports, invoicing the customer, and account history. It also gives you the ability to setup subscriptions for reoccurring jobs.

If anyone has any recommendations for features please list them here. We'd be happy to customize if you wanted it enough.