During the time when your business has been down due to the slow economy plus costs are rising for accepting handmade cards? Yes, your rates and fees you the company owner pay may be going up, way up depending on whom you do business by way of.

One Merchant Services processor announced had been raising their rates by .27%!! It really is a huge increase. Definitely doesn’t stop right now. I’ve seen several other companies jump on the bandwagon and announce they have risen their rates quite. The largest increase I’ve seen significantly has been a.45%. So if you were paying 2% you will certainly paying 2.45%.

Please keep in the mind this is not Visa, or MasterCard raising their rates, it is the Merchant Services Processing companies!

Time to buy Statements out!! You should have received these in the mail by now. In the last paragraph on final page of your statement is where they usually disclose (hide) the rate increase. It can be % the rate is going up and/or a transaction fee ($.xx) increase. In addition, it states that if you continue to process with the company May 1st you’ve agreed to their rate increase.

It may ideal to shop around for a different Merchant Services Provider if your current company is raising your rates. There are plenty of Merchant Services Providers out there that are not increasing their processing rates.

I’m frightened at the number of employers or those in control of the books for companies, who don’t even bother opening their statements anymore! This industry is very broken and quite a few of the gambling payment processors have made their statements so confusing and hard to read, that businesspeople quit opening them. This gives these companies a real easy way to increase rates and fees since all the alerts and communications are on the statements.

I have held it’s place in the payments processing industry as a free account executive (OK salesman, but account executive sounds better) for over 9 years. One of the many things I’ve learned is there are of games being played at your expense.

It is necessary to process your cards as efficiently as possible so you merely reduce the fees you pay. Lots of the fees provided for can be avoided if you exactly what to look with.