We read merchant statements for a living and publish the arithmetic. Set your numbers once, save the profile, and every future quote gets priced against it.
2.9 percent plus 30 cents costs 5.40 percent on a $12 basket and 2.98 percent on a $400 one. Same contract, double the cost, and no comparison table shows it.
Shopify adds 2 percent on Basic down to 0.2 percent on Plus for using an outside gateway. That single row decides most processor arguments before they start.
37,516 federal complaints about payment companies in a year, and 6,500 of them are money that exists and will not move yet.
The rates quoted on this site come from published schedules, and those schedules get revised. When an interchange band, a scheme fee or a settlement window changes, we tell you which one and by how much.
Every fee guide online copies the same four sentences and none of them match a real statement.
How to choose a payment processor: Bank Index scores Adyen, Square and Fiserv on fees, online selling, onboarding, reviews, risky sectors and strength.
Read it →Bank Index lists 667 card acquirers and processors, mostly licence permissions in Lithuania, France and the Netherlands. The 9 full cards for Adyen, Stripe, Worldpay and others are what an online store should read.
Read it →How to split a blended rate into its parts using nothing but your own statement, and which lines are actually negotiable.
Read it →Changing the schedule does not make money available sooner. There are 2 clocks and most shops adjust the wrong one.
Read it →Shopify Payments on Basic and Stripe both charge 2.9 per cent plus 30 cents. The third party transaction fee adds 2 per cent on top for anybody else, and the plan you are on decides how much of it you pay.
Read it →A pure processor can sit outside the federal money transmitter definition. Ask which acquiring bank stands behind the contract and look the processor up on the Visa registry.
Read it →Sort failures into reissued cards, hard declines and soft declines before touching the retry setting. After a hard decline the attempt count climbs while no charge is tried.
Read it →Each day starts its own 90-day clock, so a release still takes a quarter to finish paying out. A minimum reserve behaves the opposite way and does not unwind by itself.
Read it →The charge must be a percentage over the ECB reference rate, disclosed before payment, published on your own site, and printed on the receipt. The equal charges rule does not cover it.
Read it →Four published uplift figures, four footnotes, four different populations. The numbers fixed to the euro are in the European authentication rules, and they price every exemption band exactly.
Read it →VAMP adds TC40 fraud reports to disputes and counts by the item. Mastercard divides this month by last month. Both formulas are public and neither matches a merchant dashboard.
Read it →21 cents plus 5 basis points is the ceiling, and the rule names card-not-present as a transaction type that must run on 2 unaffiliated networks.
Read it →The switch is not in your checkout. It is a rolling 90 day fraud rate that belongs to your provider.
Read it →They share plumbing and price differently, plus the awkward detail that Shopify does not publish its card rates in one place.
Read it →Both networks count disputes, and they divide by different months. What that does to a shop that loses 3 hours of trading.
Read it →Save your store profile, come back with any new offer, and the difference over a year appears in one line.
Start with the fee breakdown →One desk reading statements and the public complaint file. Rates here are worked out from arithmetic you can repeat on your own statement, and no processor pays to appear.