Credit Card Processing Equipment and Services for my business

check costco's merchant credit card processing
You need to be an executive member though

Who ever is telling you to get a terminal for $1750.00 is a jerk. They are bending you over like a two dollar slut. DO NOT go with these people.

xpguy said: check costco's merchant credit card processing
You need to be an executive member though

Bingo! Costco has one of the better merchant programs through Nova.

DH posted some info about this in an archived thread.

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I was researching Costco again, and got the current fee structure. Basics are at the costco site. The cool thing about them is if you have an executive membership, there are no monthly fees or statement fees.

Visa/MC : 1.65% + 20 cents swipe, 1.99% + 27 cents mail/phone for "qualifying" transactions (basically, any domestic personal card, some other Visa/MCs.)

AMEX: 10 cents + 3.25%

Discover: 20 cents + 2.52% down to 1.6%, depending on transaction size.


They also sell two terminals, the Nurit 2085 for $499, and the Omni 3750 for $629. Both of these allow for multiple "merchant ID numbers", which means you can run more than one business on the same machine. A quick google search shows that these two terminals are available for around $300 online, so that seems a much cheaper way to go.
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You do not need an executive membership to Costco, but more than likley it will pay for itself, as most fees are waived for the executive members. Even buying the Executive membership just for credit card processing still makes sense in the long run.

UPDATE

Well, I got Costco to run their comparison and they wouldn't save me very much. At least they were very honest about it. Some cards would cost more, some would cost less. I even had our bank do a comparison, and they weren't much better either. So finally the guy at MSI stops hounding me and one of his co-workers calls me up. He says he's not a sales person or anything, and he has an "extra" machine and pin pad laying around and he can get me all set up for $550. And no $330 programming fee. I did have to correct their math on the comparison they ran a few times, but they will still save me more than the other guys. I guess if you just stay on the fence long enough they finally give you a reasonable deal.

I would pay a little more and go with the honest merchant. These guys that want to charge you $60/month will do something else to screw you later.

I can help you with your credit card processing.

I have a business that has an average sales ticket of less than $25 and most people pay by debit card, so this is what I got:

1.79% on visa/mc + 20 cents per transaction
1.39% on visa/mc + 20 cents per transaction for debit cards that are swiped as credit cards (no pin) (80% of my card sales are debit cards)

[you can get flat 1.69% on ALL visa/mc if you think you will have a lot more credit cards than debit cards]

Flat 50 cents per transaction on any debit (with pin)

...whenever my sale amount is above $25 and the person is paying with a debit card, I ask them to enter their pin.

I paid $475 for a brand new omni 3750 with internet docking station so all my transactions are ran through my dsl line (a LOT faster and doesn't hold up your phone line which additional lines typically cost $50/mo for a business)

if you want an omni 3750 that just runs through the phone line, its only $375 brand new. they shipped it to me for $15 (2nd day) and I have a 5yr overnight replacement warranty on this terminal

my monthly statement fee is $6

I found this to be the best & reliable deal out there, there were others quoting less but weren't very reliable

I would say you can probably find a better deal than this and depending on your credit card sales volume per month, it may be worth your time.

I'm still interested in good alternatives to costco...would folks with other merchant accounts please share their experiences?

dave I highly recommend sams payment solutions. I faxed them a blank Sams Plus card (they were just lying on the sams club counter) which allowed me to avoid the monthly fee.

I have two accounts. one for swiped cards: 1.58% plus 20cents per trans. one for mail order/phone order 1.95% plus 20 cents. the debit pinpad transactions cost a varying percentrage plus fee, which is VERY hard to compute because each network (Cirrus, star, etc) clear at a different price. most places online seem to say they charge between 10-19cents per transaction plus 1/4th of 1% to 1/2 of 1%.

the thing I've learned to watch out for is shady 'billback fees-transaction cleared as commercial card' or 'missing/invalid trans data'. If I swipe or key a commercial company purchase card it asks for items like PO # sales tax amount etc to provide them with enhanced statments. They are killing me because the billback fee is 1.95% on TOP OF the original fee. Means on a $2000 sale I go from paying $35 in fees to $75 in fees, eating up all of my profit in some cases. I have had them fax me a list of commercial card prefixes and I have plans to get a THIRD merchant id, one setup at approx 2.1% for commercial only.

If anyone here does a significant charge volume at rates similar to what I mentioned, 1.58% swiped 1.95% keyed, and DOESN'T have to worry about billbacks for commercial cards, PLEASE post or PM.

Besides those fees which FDMS says are industry standard and unavoidable I've been very happy with sams payment. next day ACH funding and very good online access.

DON'T pay monthly for a terminal. Find the eBay price and a decent seller. Positive feedback or else pay with paypal on a credit card yourself so that you get buyer protection. One merchant processor (Cardservices) that we were considering wanted $75 fee to reprogram a terminal that I owned, and it was well worth it compared to the $59x60 months that they wanted for the exact same machine.

$1750 for the machine is ridiculous expensive.

My business partner bought the machine off from the craigslist.org around $300.
The merchant services (BofA) helped me to configure the $$ machine.

didYOUsearch said: Q]im interested in hearing more about this....

are you saying they get charged more if they dont enter this info?? whats this all about??

When I call they have always told me "welcome to the world of non qualified transactions." There is another number on my rates & fees online and on my original contract and it's called maximum billback/nonqual fee. That's the maximum they can ADD to the low base rates if it's seen as either a higher risk or more work for them (like they have to work harder to track & report the address zip code on the cardholders statements). They say I will get the best rate whenever we enter all the info it proviedes, but we STILL Get the billback fee because we're not coded as commercial. If we were coded as commercial, we'd get the billback fee on non commercial cards. It's a win win for First Data... These fees show up on our statement every month and on mymerchantview.net as charges however they are a month or 2 behind. on the nov statement they billed for 'Sept billback fees'.

To summarize I have 2 merchant accounts & terminals: (newer terminals
are now designed to support 2 merchant accounts on one terminal, which
is also how software like ICVerify works).

1) mail order/phone order 1.95% for keyed, no upcharge if we accidentally run a swiped card on there. 1.89% EXTRA if it's a commercial company purchase card, or if we bypass any of the CCV # / address validation, (no fee if it's wrong though as long as we enter something other than 000).

2) swiped card present 1.58% UNLESS it's keyed or commercial then add 1.89%

I got the 2nd terminal because when I had just the nonswiped account I saw myself losing money every month we'd pay 1.95% for even keyed transactions, and I wanted to pay 1.58% on the cards that were swiped. (I did the math it worked out to us saving about $100 a month). That worked well till about April 04 when Mastercard/Visa started supposedly forcing the billback fees. My next line of thinking is to setup a third merchant account for commercial cards with a a blended swiped/keyed rate... last I knew it was about 2.1% but then they don't care if they are swiped or not.

I'm glad this topic came up because I KNOW that WalMart/Dell/Amazon do not have to pay the worst of each world in rates. Maybe Dell has decided to take a blended 2.5% rate and never pay an upcharge for a commercial card I don't know. Considering AMEX never charges less than 3% maybe some companies just take that cost on.

What I do know are that my two individual rates are as low as I've seen, however they seem to make up for it some months in the billback fees.

I've had reps from other processing places call to do a quote and when I tell them this is the only thing I'm not happy with, they say sorry they can't help me either since we'd have that with any processor. I don't know for certain if that's the case (would love some feedback here), but it is costing me $50-100 a month.