Before Choosing a provider...

[Formpay]

A Lot of people choose a provider simply on 2 things, The discount rate and the transaction fee. What a lot of merchant pay no attention to is the other fees involved.

Some fees you might not know about:
- Address verification fee (Internet merchants) Alot of companies charge anywhere from 5-10 cents for this. Some companies do not charge anything.

- Charge back Fee: Usually $25-$35 per charge back

- BATCH HEADER fee: This is the cost of depositing your money into your bank account. Usually around 30 cents. (All companies charge this) This is charge per day not per sale. For example if you make 10 sales today, you will only be charged the batch fee once. If you do not make any sales, then you will not be charged.

- Mid Qualification discount rate: MC/Visa charges more for transaction which do not meet the "Qualified Rate" standards. For example if you manually enter a customers debit card information but do not use AVS it is considered "Mid-Qualified" Most companies charge 2.5-2.8% for these transactions.

- Non Qualified discount Rate: This you will rarely and possibly never be charged (unless you do international or alot of B2B transactions) Usually this rate is around 5%. However if you do alot transactions and will be charged the non qualified rate regularly, Talk to your merchant service provider and they will lower this rate down. However they will have to increase you Qualified and Mid qualified rates a bit.

Every company charges all of the fees above (with the exception of the AVS fee) Most companies charge about the same rates, However some may charge more to makeup for giving away

[513dukies]

Let me start by saying that a Retail discount of 1.29%, is ABSOLUTLEY FALSE!

That is well below Visa/MasterCard's bottom line rate. I truly hope no one falls into this trap.