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It is not difficult to get the cheapest credit card processing in Canada. You need to know what to look for and make sure you work with the best payment processor.
The average interchange rate paid by merchants is about 1.81%. If you want to accept Visa and MasterCard, you’re not going to get below that on average. Any payment processor that tells you that they are cheaper than interchange is almost certainly hiding something. They are not going to lose money on payment processing.
Interchange is the non-negotiable costs that come from the credit card banks. That is the base cost. This is not the end cost that merchants pay. There are markups from payment processors. If that’s getting confusing, you can read here about the credit card processing industry.
Most merchants are paying 3% or more to credit card processing companies. Here’s what to look for to get the cheapest credit card processing.
There two main types of accounts you can have to accept credit cards. You can either get a dedicated merchant account for your business or you can have a shared merchant account that is used by many businesses at once.
A merchant account is like a bank account. It is an account that is specific for your business. When you have your own merchant account, it is customized for your business and considers things like the amount of dollars you process, the average transaction size, and the different types of credit cards you accept. If you process more that $100,000 per year in credit card payments, it’s time to get a merchant account. It will save you money by reducing your credit card processing fees.
When you get your merchant account set up, make sure you work with a great payment processor that will set up the options that are optimal for your business so you can save. Things such as using the right merchant category code (MCC) makes a difference in your payment processing cost.
An aggregator account is basically a shared merchant account. These are the accounts you get from great companies like Paypal, Square, and Stripe. They are fast to sign up and have no monthly fees. If you are processing below $100,000 per year, they are likely a good option. Once you get over $100,000 per year, the high transaction rates, like 2.9% and $0.20 per transaction, becomes higher than the lower rates with a true merchant account. This even considers the $10 per month fee that is generally charged with merchant accounts.
The cost to you as a merchant is different depending on which credit card your customer is using. For example, the three most popular credit cards are Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. But these credit cards have different prices to you. In general, the order from cheapest to most expensive is MasterCard, then Visa, then American Express. For a simple transaction, here’s a baseline range for the different card brands:
If you can sway your customers to use MasterCard more, you’ll end up having cheaper payment processing. Now, each card brand also has different credit card types. Overall, corporate cards and rewards cards have higher fees. Basic cards have lower fees.
You can tap a credit card (or you mobile phone), you can insert it with chip-and-pin, swipe it, use online payments, or manually enter a card. These methods have different rates charged to merchants. The order from cheapest credit card processing to most expensive is:
When you accept credit cards that are from out of the country, there is an international processing charge. This charge is generally around 0.11%. Some payment processors will mark up the international charge even more, so you should watch out for it. As a side note, TCM never marks these up. If you can focus on accepting credit cards from your home country, you’ll save on payment processing rates.
If you get to the point where you are accepting a lot of USA credit cards, for example, it might be time to set up a USA merchant account. This way you will not be paying the international fees.
There are several different pricing methods in payment processing. Overall, stay away from tiered pricing that uses MDR. The pricing is so complex that it’s very difficult to know what you’re actually paying. Most merchants are on tiered pricing and they are paying too much. This is one of the reasons we never use tiered pricing. It’s against our mission to drive down the cost of accepting credit cards.
The best way to get the cheapest credit card processing is to use membership pricing, flat fee pricing, or interchange plus (cost plus) pricing.
TCM is the easiest and fastest way to reduce your payment processing costs.
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TCM is a payment processor in Canada. The TCM name and logo are trademarks of TCM Inc payment processing in Vancouver, Canada. The Interac name and logo are trademarks of Interac Inc Canada. The Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX logos are trademarks of Visa International, MasterCard International Incorporated, and American Express Company. TCM is a Registered Partner/ISO of the Canadian Branch of U.S. Bank National Association.