CHECKOUT CHRONICLE . ISSUE 01 FEE TABLES REBUILT FROM STATEMENTS . NO AFFILIATE LINKS . CHECKOUTCHRONICLE.COM
CCCheckout ChronicleWhere online store money actually goes
Checkout Chronicle · Articles

The full archive

Processing costs, processor terms and settlement timing, taken apart line by line. No figure on this site comes from a processor.

2026-10-05 · 10 MIN
How to choose a payment processor: Bank Index scores Adyen, Square and Fiserv on the needs of an online store
How to choose a payment processor: Bank Index scores Adyen, Square and Fiserv on fees, online selling, onboarding, reviews, risky sectors and strength.
2026-09-24 · 9 MIN
List of payment processors: a directory built from registers holds 667 acquirers, 98 of them in Lithuania, and the useful part is 9 cards
Bank Index lists card acquirers and processors in 31 countries, 2 of them in the United States and none in the UK, because a licence that permits acquiring.
2026-09-23 · 11 MIN
How to check if a payment processor is licensed: the acquiring bank, the Visa registry and what a directory shows
US federal rules exclude a pure payment processor from the money transmitter definition, so the useful questions are which acquiring bank stands behind the.
2026-09-16 · 10 MIN
A failed renewal is 3 different problems, and retrying harder only touches 1 of them
A reissued card needs an account updater, a hard decline needs a new card from the customer, and only a soft decline is fixed by timing. Stripe keeps.
2026-09-16 · 12 MIN
A rolling reserve does not end on a date, and lifting it takes another 90 days to finish
10 per cent of each day held for 90 days means every day starts its own clock. Lifting the reserve stops new holds and leaves the queue to drain. A minimum.
2026-09-16 · 12 MIN
Your currency setting is a disclosure decision, and European law has said so since April 2020
Article 3a makes the conversion charge a percentage mark-up over the European Central Bank reference rate, shown before the buyer presses pay. Article 3(4).
2026-09-12 · 12 MIN
The two headline rates are identical to the cent, and the number that decides the choice sits three rows below them
Shopify Payments on the entry plan and Stripe both charge 2.9 per cent plus 30 cents. Run anybody else through a Shopify store and a third party transaction.
2026-08-31 · 12 MIN
The uplift number on the orchestration slide is real, published by Visa, and about something you already own
Visa publishes four different token uplift figures with four different footnotes, and none of them measures orchestration. The numbers that are fixed to the.
2026-08-31 · 12 MIN
The ratio that gets you fined is not the ratio in your dashboard, and the US line drops by a third on 1 April 2026
Visa counts fraud reports and disputes together, by count, on card not present traffic. Mastercard divides this month’s chargebacks by last month’s sales. I.
2026-08-18 · 12 MIN
Debit card interchange fee cap: the ceiling on your debit traffic, and the routing choice that is legally yours
I spent 2 years telling merchants that the processor decides how a debit payment travels. The regulation says the opposite, in plain words, and it says it.
2026-08-14 · 10 MIN
How instant payouts work, and the clock most shops are adjusting by mistake
Changing the payout schedule does not make money available sooner. It only changes the sweep. The 2 clocks, where days disappear into weekends, the same-day.
2026-08-06 · 12 MIN
Backup payment processor: the afternoon a quarter that prevents the bad fortnight
An afternoon of payment redundancy for ecommerce against a fortnight of downtime. The chargeback ratio threshold that puts a merchant into a monitoring.
2026-08-04 · 14 MIN
Payment processor comparison: the four terms that cost more than the rate
The rate is the number on the page and it is rarely the number that costs you. The four merchant account fees terms that decide the bill, what a rolling.
2026-08-04 · 13 MIN
Does 3D Secure hurt conversion: the switch is not in your checkout
Whether your customer gets challenged is decided by a rolling 90 day fraud rate belonging to your provider, and by which of the 3 basket bands your order.
2026-08-03 · 11 MIN
Payment processing fees: the quote is a percentage and the bill is a total
Rebuilt from a published price list and a Federal Reserve data collection, because the earlier version of this piece rested on one private statement. Your.