4 Ways to Lower Your Rate when Processing Credit Cards

If you have a customer in front of you, swiping or dipping the card will get you a lower rate than manually keying in the same card. Interchange rates are closely related to risk – the more risk a transaction holds, typically the more expensive it is. By keying in a card manually, the card brands (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express) see that as card-not-present. Any time a card is considered to be away from the point of sale, higher risk is implied, thus a higher cost for that transaction. Long story short: if you can see the whites of their eyes, swipe or dip the card. Do everything you can to avoid manually keying in a transaction.

If you operate in a card-not-present world (e-commerce or mail/telephone orders), the more customer information you can provide, the lower your rate will be. With every transaction, providing the AVS information, which is the customers’ street address and zip code, will help qualify your transactions at the lowest possible rate.  Even greater savings can be achieved with Level III interchange.  This is unique to business and purchasing cards.  Lowering the rate to this level requires a substantial amount of data to be submitted, usually from a specialized gateway like the one offered by BASYS Processing.

Setting your terminal up for auto-settlement is a quick update to any piece of equipment and can help improve your situation immediately. Many merchants have not been taught that leaving transactions un-settled in a terminal for more than 24 hours actually makes those transactions cost more!  Except for very unusual circumstances, your processor should set your equipment to auto settle at the same time every day.

While the credit card terminal is still the standard means to accept a card payment, there are numerous other solutions, frequently unique to an industry. There are systems designed to accept credit cards specifically for e-commerce businesses, and systems that are designed just for restaurants.  Other systems are designed to operate in a business-to-business (B2B) environment, or for companies whose primary sales are recurring monthly payments.  Just because the terminal you’ve been using for the last 5 years technically works, that doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for you right now.  We recommend continually working with your credit card processor to learn what options are available to you, and ensure you’re using the solution that can offer you the lowest rate qualifications and other helpful functionalities.