“Credit card surcharges are illegal in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Texas. Merchants should be aware of their state laws before applying convenience fees or surcharges to transactions.”
You can find the related post here:
http://blog.goemerchant.com/can-you-charge-customers-a-fee-for-using-a-credit-card/
Again, there are so many factors to consider when looking at processing rates. The best and most transparent pricing is the “Interchange Plus”
Other than that, your effective rate changes from month to month depending on the type of cards processed, and the way your merchant account is setup by your sales rep.
Factors that can affect your rates significantly:
[]Reward Cards (Highest Interchange Rate) - Not much you can do about that.
[]Debit Card Acceptance using a pin pad (Lowest Interchange Rates than Credit Rates, but higher transaction fees for use of pin pad up to 25 cents per transaction. - Accept Debit cards as Credit since Debit cards have the lowest interchange rate anyways and you can avoid the added transaction fees for the use of a pin pad.
[]Swiped/Dipped vs Keyed Entry (If your keyed transactions are over 30% of your total transactions the rates will be adjusted by the processing company to a higher percentage)
[]Not acceptance of Amex (If you don’t want to accept American Express because you think you will save on fees since Amex has its own rates and are higher than the other 3 major cards issuers, learn that you do not qualify for low transaction fees and percentage rates because you opted out of accepting Amex. You can include Amex to qualify for better rates and just not accept it in store. It does not cost you anything extra to be signed up with Amex as long as it is through your current processor and not a separate agreement. Also learn that American Express has higher rates because they pay a percentage to the processing companies so the companies won’t charge you anything extra. But they do it anyways).
[]Tiered Pricing vs Interchange (Avoid Tiered pricing like hell!)
[]Non-PCI Compliant (PCI Compliance has a fee, either monthly or annual, but not being PCI compliant adds a monthly “Penalty Fee” up to $20.
[]Address Verification [AVS - Zip Code] (By adding zip code verification to your transactions you add most likely 5 to 10 cents per transactions. Ask to waive the AVS fee and to completely turn off this feature)
[]Statement Fee (Get your statement online only to have any paper statement fees waived)
[]Daily Batch Fee (Should not be higher than 5 cents per batch)
[]Monthly account fee / Monthly support fee (You should not be paying any fees for having an active merchant account or for support. These services are available to you with your merchant account at no extra cost.
[]Basis Points, Transaction fees & authorization fees. (You should be really careful here as these are the fees that you’re paying towards the processing company’s profits. You will always be charged in two ways: A percentage fee (Basis points) for every dollar processed and usually few cents as a fee per transaction or per authorization, not both. If you are being changed a transaction & and authorization fee then you are being charged 3 times!
- ]Basis Points: If you have a “Discount Rate” of 25 basis points, that translates to 0.25% for every dollar processed on top of your interchange fee.
[]Transaction fees: If you have a transaction fee let’s say 10 cents, you should not have an authorization fee as well. If you have both, then something is wrong! Transaction fees are the cents that apply every time you swipe a card. The lower fee you can get on that, the better!
[]Authorization fees: Are the cents that apply with every successful transaction. So if you have 10 cents transaction and 10 cents per authorization, then you actually pay 20 cents per authorized (successful) transaction!
Either way, your effective rate should not be over 2.5% at its highest point. Unless you’re using additional services such as an online payment gateway (
Authorize.Net or others), any mobile enabled card readers or gprs terminals used for drivers, through the processor. All that adds up to you monthly total fees.
My suggestion is don’t listen to any promises without doing the research and comparison yourself. Even when you do that, you still have to stay on top of it and keep track of any changes to your account. That way it won’t take you long to figure out if anything has changed and you’re being overcharged.
thanks.