Plain-English breakdowns of fees, pricing models, and industry practices so you can make smarter decisions for your business.
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The paragraph nobody reads at the table Devin Almost Signed Without Reading the One Paragraph That Decides When He Can Leave Devin Marsh was forty minutes into a processing pitch in the back office of his Spokane bike shop when the rep slid the agreement across the desk and uncapped a pen. The rate looked […]
Read Article →The number nobody reads Renata Okafor Saw 11,000 Copays a Year. She Never Saw the Rate Underneath Them. Renata Okafor runs an outpatient physical therapy practice in Boise, Idaho, and like most clinic owners she treats physical therapy payment processing as plumbing — something that should just work in the background. Three treatment rooms, two […]
Read Article →The Checkout Option Customers Now Expect Should Your Business Offer Buy Now, Pay Later? A few years ago, splitting a purchase into four interest-free payments was a novelty confined to a handful of online retailers. Today it is a checkout fixture. Customers arrive expecting the option, and a growing share of small businesses now offer […]
Read Article →A Different Rail Entirely Pay by Bank Lets a Customer Pay Straight From Their Checking Account Almost every payment a small business takes runs over a card network. Even the ones that do not feel like cards — a tap, a digital wallet, a saved card on file — are still card transactions underneath, carrying […]
Read Article →A New Provision Merchant Buying Groups Could Let Small Businesses Negotiate Interchange Directly For almost twenty years, the price a small business pays to accept a Visa or Mastercard credit card has been effectively non-negotiable. Interchange rates are set by the card networks on published schedules, and an individual coffee shop or dental practice has […]
Read Article →What Changed The Nacha Fraud Monitoring Rules Now Apply to Every Business That Sends ACH For most of the history of the ACH network, fraud-monitoring obligations sat with the banks and the largest payment originators. If your business sent payroll, paid vendors, or collected payments by bank transfer, the rules that governed fraud detection were […]
Read Article →A New Illinois Rule, Sort Of Illinois Says You Should Not Pay Interchange on Tax and Gratuity — but the Start Date Just Moved Again Here is the version an Illinois restaurant owner has probably heard: the card companies can no longer charge interchange fees on the sales tax and the tip portion of a […]
Read Article →A New Surcharging Choice Product-Level Surcharging Is the New Option Most Merchants Will Want Product-level surcharging is a new choice the proposed Visa and Mastercard settlement hands merchants, and it pairs with a second option called brand-level surcharging. For most of the time surcharging has been allowed in the United States, it worked one blunt […]
Read Article →The Terminal You Already Own Your Phone Can Now Be the Card Reader — No Hardware Required For most of the history of card acceptance, taking a payment in person meant owning a piece of hardware: a countertop terminal, a wireless reader, a dongle plugged into a tablet. That assumption is no longer true. With […]
Read Article →A New Line Item, As of April 2026 There Is Now a Fee Every Time Your Terminal Swipes a Chip Card On April 1, 2026, Mastercard introduced a new charge in the United States called the Fallback Avoidance Fee (a/k/a EMV fallback fee). It is assessed on every authorized fallback transaction — meaning every time […]
Read Article →Fees & Interchange Debit Routing Is the Part of Every Debit Transaction Your Processor Controls and You Almost Never See. Every debit card transaction in the United States has at least two possible networks that can carry it. Visa and Mastercard each run a signature debit network. Behind them sit the PIN debit networks — […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Equipment Lease Payment Processing Outlived Diego’s Software by Eighteen Months. The Bill Still Comes. Diego Salazar runs Salazar Auto Care on a side street off Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona. Three bays, two ASE-certified techs, a waiting room with a coffee pot that actually gets refilled. The kind of independent shop people drive […]
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