End of month is coming up, which means that next week you’ll be getting your merchant processing statement from your current provider. You’ll look at the list of processing fees to see if anything is being charged differently from the month than the previous month, maybe take an effective rate of the fees charged versus your credit card processing volume to see if there are any patterns from previous months, but ultimately you’ll begrudgingly file away the statement in a folder to sit otherwise idle in a file cabinet until your 1099-K at the end of the year.
Well, when the April processing statement comes to your mailbox (or inbox) next week, make sure you have this blog post handy, as it contains some ways you can save on your merchant processing!
Flat Rates
When you get your statement, if you notice you are getting charged a flat fee for all of your processing, it may seem like your processing is easier by seeing the one charge, but the reality is you are likely losing out on saving $. Unless your business is processing less than a couple thousand dollars per month, you would really benefit on having a fair & transparent pricing method, Interchange Plus.
Interchange Plus pricing takes the interchange level on the credit card which is priced by the card brands (such as Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express), and charges a nominal fee in addition to the interchange rate, which is referred to as a Discount Rate (a fee that go towards your current processor for facilitating the transaction). The fees can be as low as .05% for regulated debit cards and go upwards of 3% on corporate, purchasing & business cards which can be lowered up to 1% even further using products from CardPointe (HINT – we’ll get to that later).
A Flat Rate charges a set rate across all cards you encounter, regardless if they are regulated debit cards or corporate credit cards. This can result in significant lost savings each time a card is swiped, especially if your processing volume exceed $10,000+. Something to think about whenever you get lured by the siren’s call of a flat rate “to make things easier”.
Surcharging
If you see this term on your processing statement, run for the hills or send us an email! Seriously! What your processor is doing to you is passing an imposter rate as a card-brand interchange fee and then looping interchange into the discount rate, or they are taking your otherwise seemingly normal interchange fees and marking them up to make a small % on the card rates. At Pineapple Payments, we have a way of uncovering these fees in a full “Interchange Fact Sheet” during our statement evaluation period. We take the transaction volume, card volume and the fees paid to establish the effective rates of your current processor, and what the effective rate and fees charged would be if you were processing with us. There are many times we uncover significant additional charges being passed unbeknownst to the merchant. Yeah, that’s not what friends do to friends, and that’s not what we’ll do to you as part of the Pineapple family.
Interchange Optimization
If you are a merchant who processes transactions with other businesses, you owe it to your self to take a look at some specific interchange levels on your merchant statement closely next time. Through our CardPointe platform, you could reduce interchange fees on some of your transactions up to 1.1%. Pretty significant right?
Now I know what you are thinking, “I bet I am going to have to do a lot of extra steps in order to realize those savings.” I hope you didn’t bet much, because you would be wrong! By using a device part of the CardPointe family (such as the Virtual Terminal, Stand-alone terminal, API or even the mobile application), you can realize savings no matter where you are and how you process. The platform is uniquely configured to automatically pass the Level II and Level III line items needed in order to realize these amazing savings. How awesome is that?
Now I could go on and on about price-savings tactics on your merchant processing statement, but this quick tips will help you realize savings today and get you on the path to putting $ back into your pocket. Want to check your current pricing, or make sure you aren’t getting charged behind your back, or maybe you just want to be sure you are a good candidate for Interchange Optimization? Be sure to give us a call and we’ll squeeze the juice out of your processing to make processing life all the more sweeter.
Schedule a meeting with me today to learn how to process fresh savings: Click Here