Reducing interchange
Simply encouraging your customers to pay with "cheaper" cards can have a big impact. Asking for lower-cost cards and settling your sales regularly will help reduce rates.
Interchange fees are established by card associations to cover the costs and risks that issuing banks incur for processing payments. You can consider interchange as the "wholesale cost" of accepting credit and debit cards at your business. If you accept credit cards at your business, interchange is unavoidable, but there are ways you can limit its impact on your company’s bottom line - either by reducing the interchange rates, or passing them along to your customers indirectly.
If you don't intend to offer zero-cost processing, then your best bet is to reduce interchange as far as possible on every sale. Make sure you settle your batch every day. Not settling your batch everyday can lead to your entire batch getting downgraded - resulting in higher interchange fees. If your business environment allows, we recommend utilizing a daily auto-settlement, which is standard with all AND terminals. In addition - for card-present sales, you can always encourage cheaper cards! Let your customers know you prefer debit cards, and that they help support your small business. You'd be surprised how many customers are willing to help out, once they understand that debit is cheaper for you.
Dip or swipe all possible in-person sales for the lowest interchange rate. Card-not-present (CNP) and keyed transactions will have much higher rates than their in-person counterpart, as a transaction not in-person has an increased risk of fraud. A good rule of thumb if you are accepting a CNP transaction is to input all AVS and card data you have available. The more data input the less risk the transaction carries - effectively reducing interchange. If you fail to input address information, you'll pay roughly 0.50% higher interchange fees!
We're serious about saving money.
AND is dedicated to getting your processing rates as close to zero as possible. We utilize membership pricing along with cash discounting and surcharging programs to maximize savings. Let our analysts review your statements and see how much money we can put back in your pockets.