Her Garden Center Is Open Seven Months. The Card Fees Bill Twelve.

A Seasonal Merchant Account Kept Billing Denise After She Closed for Winter

A seasonal merchant account was the last thing Denise Pelletier expected to be paying for in November. Pelletier’s Garden Center, her nursery just outside Montpelier, Vermont, is open April through October — seven good months of bedding plants, mulch, and Saturday-morning crowds — and then the gates close until spring. So when the November statement landed showing roughly a hundred dollars billed against zero dollars in sales, her first thought was that someone had made a mistake. They hadn’t. The account had done exactly what it was set up to do: bill her every month, whether she swiped a single card or not.

Denise had never thought of the account as something she could change. Taking cards was just a cost of being open, and being closed, apparently, was a cost too. But the off-season bleed wasn’t a quirk of her statement — it’s the default outcome of putting a business that earns for five months on an account priced as if it earns for twelve.

Fixed Fees Don’t Track Your Season — They Track the Calendar

Most merchant account fees fall into two buckets. The first scales with what you process: the percentage and the per-item charge on every sale. When the doors close and volume goes to zero, that bucket goes to zero too — exactly as it should. The problem is the second bucket: the fixed monthly lines that bill the same amount in February as they do in June, regardless of whether you ran a dollar.

On a typical statement that fixed stack is a handful of small lines that nobody questions in season because real sales swamp them. Out of season, with nothing else on the page, they’re the whole bill:

• The statement fee — a flat monthly administrative charge for having the account at all.
• The PCI fee — a card-network-required compliance line, billed monthly or annually whether or not you’re processing.
• The gateway fee — a monthly charge for the payment gateway that lets you take cards online or key them in, idle or not.
• The monthly minimum fee — the one that stings most in the off-season, because it’s designed to bill you precisely when you’re not processing.
• An equipment lease, if there’s a terminal on a lease contract — and a lease bills all twelve months no matter how many you’re open.

Denise had all five. Strip away the in-season sales and her account was a fixed-fee stack of about a hundred dollars a month, billing straight through a Vermont winter.

The Fee That’s Built to Hit You in the Off-Season

The monthly minimum deserves its own paragraph because it’s the most counterintuitive line on a seasonal merchant account. A minimum is a floor on the processing revenue your provider collects: if your percentage-and-per-item fees for the month don’t add up to the floor — commonly around twenty-five dollars — you pay the difference. At a roughly 2.1% effective rate, you’d need to run well over a thousand dollars in card volume just to clear a twenty-five-dollar floor on your own. In peak season a garden center clears that on a single busy Saturday and never feels it. In January, processing nothing, you pay the entire floor for the privilege of having an open account.

Closing the Account Is Rarely the Answer

The obvious move — close the account in November, reopen it in April — almost never works the way owners hope. If you process for even one day in a month, most providers count the account open for the entire month and bill the full fixed stack. And a fully closed account isn’t a light switch: reopening typically means submitting a written request and waiting a couple of weeks, which is its own problem if a customer wants to put a spring delivery on a card before the account is live again.

Price the Account So Cost Tracks the Season

The durable fix isn’t a discount — it’s a structure where the cost follows the volume down to zero when you close. For a seasonal business that usually means a few specific choices.

Start with the pricing model. Interchange-plus pricing keeps the processor’s markup visible as a transparent line on top of the true network cost, which makes it far easier to negotiate away the fixed extras — and it’s where you push to drop the monthly minimum entirely and trim the statement fee to as close to zero as the provider will go. A no-monthly gateway option keeps the online side from billing through the winter. And owning your hardware instead of leasing it removes the single largest fixed line: a lease is a twelve-month obligation by design, and the way out of one is usually worth more to a seasonal operator than any rate cut.

The other honest option is the opposite extreme: a flat-rate aggregator with no monthly fees at all. Flat-rate pricing charges a higher percentage per sale but bills nothing when you’re closed, which can win for a very-low-volume stand or a popup. For a real garden center doing meaningful in-season volume, though, the math usually favors a merchant account with the fixed fees stripped out — you keep the lower per-sale cost during the seven months that matter without paying for the five you don’t.

The Off-Season Statement Tells You Everything

The fastest way to see your own bleed is to pull a statement from a month you were closed. Every line on it is a fixed fee, because nothing else could be there. That single page shows you the real annualized cost of the fixed stack — multiply it by your number of dead months and you have the number that’s leaving on zero revenue. For Denise, that exercise turned a vague “winter is expensive” feeling into a specific figure she could take to a renegotiation: roughly five hundred dollars a year billed on nothing, before the lease was even counted.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Send Us One Off-Season Statement. We’ll Show You the Fixed-Fee Bleed.

If your account bills the same in your dead months as your busy ones, the fixed stack is the whole problem — and on a seasonal merchant account it’s almost always fixable. Send Brookside a statement from a month you were closed and we’ll separate the network costs from your processor’s markup, show you exactly which lines bill on zero revenue, and tell you whether a restructured account or a different model would stop the bleed. The read takes about fifteen minutes. You can also review payment processing consumer protections from the CFPB.

No obligation • No pressure • Response within one business day