December 6th, 2016 by Elma Jane
The Process of Processing Electronic Payments
Today new technologies are emerging in electronic payment that allow merchants to collect valuable data on their customers; from emailing receipts to providing incentives to mention the merchant on social media.
So what’s behind the process of processing electronic payments? The heart of all your payment processing needs will most likely lie in a merchant account; with a merchant account you can deposit funds from ebt cards, debit cards, gift or loyalty cards and even checks into your bank account. If your business has never had its own merchant account, it’s probably missing out on some very valuable opportunities.
At National Transaction Corporation this process is simplified to a signature page and a voided check. We consult your business personally to establish the lowest rates and fees possible with your electronic payment processing. We ask detailed questions about how you process your transactions, and if you already process credit cards, we offer a free statement review where we determine your most common transaction types and how to lower their fees and rates.
How Much Will Electronic Payment Processing Cost?
There are three parts to the answer:
Up front or startup costs – include things like an application fee, an account setup fee and equipment fees. At NTC, we don’t have any application, setup or cancellation fees on our services. Our credit card readers and terminals are nonproprietary and will work with almost any merchant services provider and we sell them at cost to make it easier on our merchants.
When you buy a terminal from us you own it and are free to leave us at any time and use the terminal to process through another merchant account provider with no penalty payments at all.
Other startup costs might be:
- check readers,
- cash registers and receipt printers
- mobile point of sale software
- credit card swipe readers
- Accounting software (Intuit’s Quickbooks Pro or PeachTree)
If you already own any of this equipment we can integrate your existing hardware into our services.
Monthly service fees – depend on what services are required; included in the monthly fee detailed statements and reporting on transaction activity.
Transaction fees – MasterCard, Visa and American Express set what are called interchange rates. Interchange rates are a per transaction fee and/or a percentage rate based on the total of a sale. Interchange rates are very complex and consume hundreds of pages of different types of electronic transactions. These transactions are based on the type of business processing the transaction, the way the credit card data is input (like a credit card that is swiped in or manually keyed into a credit card terminal of some type) and the type of credit card used for the transaction (rewards card, corporate card, travel and entertainment credit cards, ebt cards and so on). With so many types of cards and businesses to process it’s impossible to give an accurate rate for all charges.
Again, we have no fees associated with applying for or setting up the merchant account and there is no penalty for cancellation so there are no risks in trying it out. We can do merchant rate review for free. Call us now 888-996-2273
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: credit cards, customers, data, electronic payment, merchant account, merchants, mobile, payment processing, point of sale, services provider, terminal, transactions