Plain-English breakdowns of fees, pricing models, and industry practices so you can make smarter decisions for your business.
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Fees & Interchange When a client hands you a year of merchant processing statements at tax time, you are looking at one of the most opaque line items on the P&L. Processing fees show up aggregated in QuickBooks as one number, but that number is built from 30 to 60 individual merchant statement line items […]
Read Article →Risk & Fraud Prevention A chargeback fee is what your processor charges you the moment a cardholder disputes a transaction with their bank. It is separate from the transaction amount being clawed back. It is separate from the dispute outcome. It arrives before you know anything is wrong, and in most cases it is not […]
Read Article →Fees & Interchange Most merchants believe ACH is free. Or close to it. The assumption makes sense — ACH moves money directly between bank accounts without touching the card networks, so there is no interchange, no Visa, no Mastercard, no assessment fees. It feels like it should be cheap. It is cheaper than card processing. […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Arjun called me on a Tuesday morning in March. He runs a CBD and hemp retail shop in Denver — the kind of store with apothecary jars on warm wood shelves, a full product catalog, and a steady book of regulars who have been shopping there since it opened. He is careful with […]
Read Article →Mike runs a pest control company in Portland. Twelve years in business. Good reputation. Steady residential book, a handful of commercial accounts. He called me because he wanted to look at his processing costs — he had heard that a merchant surcharge program might be worth considering, and wanted to understand it before dismissing it. […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Mei had been running her Portland pawn shop on Stripe for almost three years without a single Stripe fund hold or any real support problem. Small transactions mostly — $80 for a tablet, $200 for a ring, $350 for a guitar amp. Stripe was fine for that. Easy setup, no underwriting conversation, money […]
Read Article →A payment processor holding funds is one of the most disruptive things that can happen to a merchant — and one of the least explained. The money was collected. The transactions cleared. The customers were charged. And now the funds are sitting in a reserve account with no clear release date and a support line […]
Read Article →Fees & Interchange A statement fee shows up on your merchant processing statement every month without fail. It is one of the smallest line items on the page — and one of the most reliably misunderstood. It is also one of the few charges on your statement that is pure processor margin with no floor, […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Merchants searching for WorldPay alternatives are usually not rate shopping. They’ve already filed WorldPay complaints or spent hours on hold with support. Carlos owns a furniture store in Tulsa — not a chain, a real one. He knows the names of his delivery drivers, knows which vendors are slow in Q1, and knows […]
Read Article →Business Growth Reverse engineering goals is not a productivity hack. It is a different way of thinking about what a goal even is — and most people, including a SaaS founder I spoke with last week, are operating at the wrong level entirely. Barbara runs a SaaS company in Palo Alto. Not a startup — […]
Read Article →Fees & Interchange Most merchants see a monthly minimum fee on their processing statement and assume it is a penalty for low volume. It is not. The monthly minimum fee is a floor — a way for processors to ensure that the fixed costs of maintaining your account are covered regardless of how much you […]
Read Article →Human Nature · Barry Series · Part 4 This is Part 4 of the Barry series. Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 Small business accountability is not about checking in to see if someone failed. Accountability for small business owners is not about performance reviews or status reports. It is about staying close […]
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