All Merchant Ecommerce

Many business owners tend to focus too much on their credit card processer’s fees and not their transactions fees to their peril. The costly mistake will devastate your business before you know it.

You pay two different types of fees for each credit card transaction. The discount rate covers your transaction volume, while the flat transaction fee covers everything else. You pay a transaction fee every time your credit card reader or software sends or receives information from your processor.

Transaction fees have many names including authorization fees, return fees, AVS fees, and gateways fees, and you can have more than one of them on each individual credit card transaction.

Processors split their transaction fees to appear more competitive. You often see it as the address verification (AVS) fee on card-not-present transactions.

Authorization fees are the only transaction fees credit card processors quote. You pay an authorization fee every time you authorize a credit card transaction. Everything else gets buried in fine print.

Processors charge per item fees every time your equipment contacts the process to transfer or download information.

You pay communication (WAT) fees when your readers dial your processor’s toll-free number to get or send information.

Return item fees cover any and all refunds you give to your customers.

You pay AVS fees when you either directly key in a transaction or when your customers purchase stuff from your website and other e-commerce venues.

You get gateway fees when your e-commerce transactions go through a gateway service.

Wireless service fees cover all wireless communication between you and your processor.