Ideal Rates and Fees for Merchant Account (part 1 of 2)

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If you are a business owner who wants to accept credit card, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of card payment for goods and services, you must apply for a merchant account or widely known as payment processing or credit card processing. This type of service is not provided free and offered only to business owners with outstanding credit history. To succeed in this mode of payment, you need to understand certain specifications regarding its applicable rates and fees. For starters, it may sound complicated but as you go through same transactions each day, things will get familiar to you. Here are few merchant account jargons you’ll encounter.

Monthly and Interchange fees

The merchant account provider has the discretion in applying the monthly fees. Visa and MasterCard set a schedule of rates called Interchange fees wherein greater part of the per-item and percentage fees passes through the provider to the issuing bank. All transactions occurred are categorized into an interchange category according to the kind of card used for each transaction and its circumstances. An example to this are the transactions made in the credit card terminal through swiping and the transactions made manually, these two are categorized differently.

A transaction made through a reward card is also different with the transaction made using a standard card. When this various customization sum up, there are 130 categories with different rate. Then, from the 130 categories, merchant account providers group these into 3 to 6 categories, each with a single rate. The rates are based on the average interchange rate expected for each category with an additional markup.