Screen Printers Open - A Forum for Screen Printing and Embroidery

Howdy all,

What is everyone looking at for a total percentage cost of processing card sales? I'm talking, on average, any given months fees as a percentage of total card sales.

I see all these different rates that look good but every service provider has different monthly charges, etc. As a biz owner I just want to know the average percent I'm paying to accept this form of payment and if that rate is competitive.  That lets me make rational, informed decisions on it.

Finally learned how to pick apart my cc service invoices to get those numbers and on average in 2009 I'm at about 2.68% as the total cost of processing a card sale. This is the all-in cost of it, including a monthly fee. Another way to put it would be $6/month plus 2.38%. For some reason, 2009 has stared out higher as an average, but we'll see as it goes on.

How's this compare to yours?

couldn't tell you. be careful of cc companies, some charge us -the retailers -for those stupid frequent flier miles and those point cards. If a customer uses a card that they gain credits towards a *free* airline ticket, guess who pays for it. . our percentage that we get dinged on those cards is a little higher. atleast it used to be, I changed to a company through the NFIB and it got rid of those stupid charges. i want to say it's 1.5 - 2% on swiped cards and a little higher if we type it in.

This is what I'm getting at- what exactly is it costing us as merchants to use this service?

If we're paying, with all costs considered upwards of 4% to process credit transactions on average it deserves a hard look and maybe even considering going all cash/check or something. Hell, you could just boost sales to compensate for any lost cc purchases by hiring a salesman at 4% commission if you were all wholesale.  In our case wee can't do that because we need to process online sales off our website. But, just saying.

And yeah, agreed on the "rewards" cards. That's bullshit and those companies need to be called out on it. I'm considering not accepting them, explaining why and then offering to swipe another card or give a small discount for a cash payment to increase awareness of the issue. If I'm paying for rewards for card users I want my company getting credit for the rewarding not those bastard cc companies who are already making good $ off my business.

When we started taking plastic I raised
all mark ups 5% across the board.

If we were at 1.7 it to 1.75 and so forth.
If they pay with cash or check it stays at 1.75.

Getting serious about going to 1.78 etc.

-Rob

PayPal works out to about 3%. No monthly fees.
Wouldn't work in a retail setting... but works fine when taking a down-payment before starting a job.

Someone makes a machine that integrates with the PayPal processing. I want to say it is around $300. It gives the customer the little terminal and logs in to PayPal somehow. You only pay for the machine and no monthly fee. I'll dig around and see if I can find the flyer on it.