There are a few main types of credit card processing rates with their own advantages and disadvantages. There are flat rates, tiered pricing rates, interchange plus rates, Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 processing rates.
Credit Card Processing Rates – PROs and CONs
Flat Rates
- PRO - One flat percentage (plus a transaction fee), no other fees.
- PRO - Good for smaller volume merchants.
- CON - Weak because competitive credit card processors can just lower the rate
- CON - Credit card processor takes a lot of risk if their prices are too low’ so processors have to account for higher interchange rates in their fees.
Tiered Pricing
- PRO - Flexible options with Fully-Qualified, Mid-Qualified, & Non-Qualified
- PRO – Ability to have lower tiers compared to FLAT RATE
- PRO - Stable pricing available, qualify transactions into tier buckets
- CON - Qualified Rates along with some hard costs billed separately
- CON - Extremely obscure and hard to translate where costs are coming from exactly
Interchange Plus
- PRO - Easy to show transparency.
- PRO - Ability to negotiate the lowest possible costs on a merchant account
- PRO - Merchant pays the hard-cost associated with each transaction, plus a markup fee from the merchant services provider
- PRO – Ability to benefit from level 2 and Level 3 interchange rates
- CON - If costs go up they are absorbed by the merchant
Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 Credit Card Processing
- PRO - Visa and Mastercard created special interchange rates as a way to encourage business to business and business to government merchants to provide specific line item detail, typically found on an invoice
- PRO - The higher the level the lower the rate. Level 3 processing lowers your interchange rate by as much as 40% before your credit card processor adds their mark-up
- PRO - As displayed below, the more data a merchant provides the lower the rate:
Get the Best Rates with Integrated Acumatica Level 3 Credit Card Processing
Successful businesses are constantly looking for ways to increase profits by increasing sales, productivity and cutting costs. Using tools to automate business processes is an excellent way to reduce costs, save time and reduce human error associated with manual data entry. When it comes to credit card processing, there are a few ways to cut costs dramatically through automation. If your business processes $30,000 or more in business to business credit card transactions, you have an opportunity to cut costs with Level 3 Credit Card Processing automation.
If you are using Acumatica, you have the power at your fingertips to leverage Level 3 Credit Card processing automation. You can set-up as many credit cards for a customer as you need with the APS Payments Acumatica Level 3 Credit Card Processing integration. The credit cards are stored in APS Payments secure tokenized vault. You don’t have to re-enter the credit card information each time you process a customer’s transaction. All you have to do is click on the authorize transaction button and it goes right through the payment gateway. Once authorization is complete, you get a preauthorization or completed transaction ID.
Please watch demonstration below:
APS Payments automates the process by taking the required fields out of Acumatica and delivering them to Visa and Mastercard to get the lowest rate available. Level 3 is not available with Authorize.net. Please find an example of Level 3 Processing savings below:
Let us help you get the lowest rate! APS Payments will analyze your statements in order to determine if your company is a candidate for Acumatica Level 3 processing.
