Mercury Payment Fees

A

aj453

New member
I have two locations. One is a dine in, seating for 100 and take out. The second is a smaller location in a bar area. I am currently paying 2.6% at the large location, and 3.6% at the bar area. No manual entry at either location. Avg. ticket is about $15 the main location, $7 at bar location. These percentages seem high. I have worked with mercury two times before, and each time they said they couldn’t go any lower. Is this right? I just used them because that is what Point of Success recommended, but overall they are awful to deal with
 
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Those are fairly low ticket averages, so that’s why you’re seeing your percentage so high - the swipe charges really drive up the percentage on small tickets. 12 cents on $7.00 is 1.7% alone before the interchange fees.

We have nearly a $30.00 average ticket, so my 12 cent swipe fee only amounts to 0.4% before the interchange fees (which should be the same for both of us.) That means you pay an extra 1.3% than I do just because of your ticket size even though we may have the exact same rates from Mercury.
 
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Thanks. Slice operation in a college town. I cant tell you the number of people that try to charge $1
 
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If you think their regular fees are a bit high, whatever you do don’t look at what they charge for processing online order charges. Yikes!
 
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brad randall:
If you think their regular fees are a bit high, whatever you do don’t look at what they charge for processing online order charges. Yikes!
Click to expand...
Are you referring to Mercury? I’d like to hear more info because we’re about a month away from launching OLO with Point of Success.
 
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A 2.5 discount rate and an item rate of .25 for web processing. After tacking on surcharges and other fees we’re at 5.3%. Oh, and don’t forget the $19.95 statement fee… even though the same exact statement cost me $5.00 for my regular transactions.

I’ve been told (by a rep) they will review the rates once we get the online volume up a bit more. I’m not holding my breath.
 
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I’m surprised that they treat your online orders differently than your regular orders. With my POS and processing, I do not think you can differentiate the online order credit cards. They process through the POS just as if we had keyed them in I think. Were you processing your credit cards through your POS prior to adding online ordering or were you using a separate machine to process them?
 
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Our POS orders process through an integrated Windows program loaded on one of our workstations. The web orders process through a separate secure online gateway (Authorize.net) and carry the higher “web order” rates as a result. Even after we switch online ordering companies and become fully integrated, the online credit cards will still be processed through a separate gateway.

Is your system really sending the credit-card data from the online site to your POS for processing? How does that meet PCI compliance standards? If it is compliant, I think I need to look into whatever POS system you are using!
 
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My online ordering credit cards process via PC Charge on my server just like my regular credit card transactions. As far as compliance? I’m really not sure but I am trusting my POS company to be sure this is in compliance.
 
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FREEPOS from Positive-Feedback Software is compliant. Although I’m not using OLO atm, I’m considering it, but don’t like the idea of something like Mercury or Heartland being involved in any way!
 
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Brad,

Like Paul’s system, SpeedLine supports processing of online order payments at the POS.

The concern you mentioned is with PCI-DSS requirement 1.3, which prohibits “direct public access between the Internet and any system component in the cardholder data environment.â€

On our PCI auditor’s advice, we handle this by installing our OrderLink firewall on a separate PC that is segregated from the POS network. This firewall accepts and scans the incoming web orders, and then forwards them through a second router to the POS network for processing.

This does require an extra PC, but the requirements are minimal, so many users have an old computer that can serve this purpose. And as you noted, it keeps the payment processing costs lower on every transaction.

Jennifer@SpeedLine
 
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