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April 12th, 2013:

Interchange Fees for Payment Processing – A Huge Global Tax

Apr 12th, 2013
by JJ Belle.
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Have you ever seen the 12% or even 24% interest rates that Visa, MasterCard, American Express & Discover charge and think about how rich those companies have to be charging such ridiculously high interest rates?  Here is the crazy part – that is another HUGE part of their financial success that you may not know about – it’s called interchange fees.

Here is how interchange fees work:

  1. Visa, MasterCard, American Express & Discover charge every company in the world that processes through them a percentage of every transaction.  These interchange fees range between 1% of a transaction to as high as 3-4% per transaction.
  2. These fees essentially are fees that any company that accepts credit cards has to pay.
  3. In effect, these credit card companies are enacting a global tax on almost all electronic transactions ranging from 1.2% to 4% per transaction.
  4. Companies to combat these fees essentially charge an extra 1% to 4% for everything they sell – and this costs gets passed directly onto the consumer with a higher cost for a service or product.

As a small business, it is important for you to partner with a merchant services partner that can keep your rates as close to true interchange as possible – and therefore lower your payment processing costs.

PayPal Goes Mobile With Magento

Apr 12th, 2013
by JJ Belle.
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Here is some more information about the fast and exciting changes in mobile merchant services.  This story comes from Gigaom.

When eBay bought Magento in 2011 it gained an e-commerce platform that merchants could use to create custom online stores, but eBay has largely kept Magento separate from its most famous e-commerce acquisition, PayPal. That’s now changing, though, as the two are announcing a partnership to integrate PayPal’s m-commerce and mobile payments technology with Magento’s service.

In an upcoming blog post Wednesday, PayPal CTO James Barrese said his company is creating two new extensions for Magento’s 150,000 merchants. The first, called In-Aisle Selling, hooks PayPal’s point-of-sale mobile payments service Here directly to a merchant’s store. Here lets a salesman to take a credit or debit card payment anywhere in the store with PayPal’s triangular magnetic reader, while Magento’s ordering and inventory system pulls down all purchase and customer details.

The second extension is called Order Ahead, which lets merchants set up shop in PayPal’s mobile app. In January, PayPal launched a pilot project with one of its key mobile payments customers, Jamba Juice. Customers could access Jamba Juice’s menu from the app, place an order while waiting in line or before they arrived — even make special substitution requests — and of course pay for their drink.

Barrese said the pilot was a success and now it’s expanding Order Ahead, starting with Magento merchants. Stores can use specialized templates to create their menus or catalogs and synchronize their opening hours and locations with PayPal’s ordering system. Merchants can then manage the pre-orders through a simple console available in the extension or directly integrate Order Ahead into their existing point-of-sale systems using Magento’s APIs. Customers can pick up their orders either by presenting their names, order numbers or the QR code on their mobile phones.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/04/10/ebays-paypal-and-magento-join-hands-offering-mobile-payment-service/

 

Merchant Services for At Home Care Services

Apr 12th, 2013
by JJ Belle.
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Running an at home care business is one of the most noble businesses that one can run. It is a business that is 100% about serving others. When it comes to bill collection from customers after insurance and medicare reimbursements this process is the last conversation that you want to have with your customers as they deal with the challenges of illness and aging. This is why it is important for you to have a good merchant services processing partner like Choice Merchant Services that enables you to automatically bill your clients without having to bother them and ask for payments. This process can save you the work and hassle of most of your bill collection and allow you and your customers to focus on the most important part of your business – caring for the sick and aging.

Choice Merchant Services offers merchant services processing rates starting at 1.05%. Our low rates save your company mone and enables you to either increase your profits or lower the rates that you charge your customers. In addition, our recurring billing systems that we offer with PCCharge, PlugNPay, and Authorize.net enable you to put your cutomer billings on auto pilot and then send you alerts whenever an automatic billing fails due to a bad check and an expired credit or debit card.