October 25, 2013

The Importance of Interchange for Global eCommerce and SaaS Businesses

By Zachary Smith

For most merchants, Interchange Fees represent the largest portion of their costs for accepting electronic payments from their customers.  With nearly all eCommerce and card-not-present or recurring transactions paid via a major credit card, the reimbursement fees that are paid to card issuers add up to be a big cost.  This can be exacerbated if merchants process international cards often, accept a lot of business-to-business payments or don’t submit all the necessary information along with the transaction request (i.e. invoice number, sales tax breakout, etc).  However, the single biggest cause of higher interchange costs for merchants is the fact that most merchants, especially smaller businesses, are not setup to benefit from the “ins and outs” of interchange reimbursement on regulated debit cards, check cards and refunds.

At MerchantPlus, we’ve always worked hard to simply the process of accepting credit cards for online businesses — this started back in 2003 when we were the first to offer a fully online signup process, including a digital signature and instant account confirmation.  We continued on that by creating our cutting-edge NaviGate gateway and virtual terminal and including it for FREE with all of our account packages.  Later, as regulation and security requirements (PCI-DSS) increased the ad-hoc fees for merchants, we again simplified things by including all processor, gateway and compliance fees in our low, flat-fee account option.

In November, we’re innovating again by introducing a series of new payment processing options for small, medium and large online businesses.  Our small business account, dubbed the “Starter” account, will feature no monthly or signup fees and have a super-low flat fee for all transaction types.  However, we’ve decided to automatically introduce the benefits of Interchange to our “Advanced” and “Enterprise” accounts — something you can’t get with popular online services such as Stripe, Braintree, Square or PayPal.  That means businesses processing over $5,000/mo in sales can benefit for regulated debit card costs as low $0.22 per transaction as well as get refunds on any and all interchange costs when you have to reverse and refund a sale to a customer.  These savings, along with the visibility into the interchange effects of your international, cross-border or business transactions (and how you can optimize those transactions to get a better rate) result in huge savings for larger processing merchants.

We’re excited to roll out our new account offerings, especially for the fast-growing global eCommerce and SaaS businesses that can immediately take advantage of optimized interchange to lower their global payment processing costs.

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