Defensible, data-rich analysis of card acceptance — interchange, routing, dual pricing, chargebacks — written for the people who actually read the statement.
You pay one blended number every month. It is built from three very different layers — interchange, assessments, processor markup — and only one of them is negotiable. The fee waterfall, in basis points.
Every number is cited to a public source or framed as an illustrative model. No invented statistics.
One model bundles your markup into a single number; the other exposes it. Which wins depends entirely on your card mix.
Find your true effective rate, separate interchange from negotiable markup, and spot the junk fees padding the bottom.
The processor decides which bucket each sale lands in — and your reward cards quietly get downgraded into the costly one.
Debit, credit, rewards, and corporate cards carry wildly different interchange. Shifting the mix moves your rate more than any negotiation.
A 15-minute pass through the line items that bloat every statement — and which ones you can waive, shrink, or kill outright.
Real PCI compliance is a questionnaire. The monthly "PCI fee" is something else — and it's often removable.
Restaurants, retail, salons, healthcare, and e-commerce land at very different rates — for reasons rooted in card mix and ticket size.
On a $4 sale, the fixed per-transaction fee dwarfs the percentage. The math that quietly punishes coffee shops and food trucks.
Keyed and online transactions carry higher interchange and fraud risk. How an omnichannel business ends up with a blended rate — and how to cut it.
OptBlue narrowed the gap for smaller merchants. The accept-or-decline decision comes down to your average ticket and your clientele.
Batch cutoffs, settlement timing, and the real working-capital value of getting your money a day sooner.
Flat per-transaction pricing makes ACH a quiet winner on large-ticket B2B and recurring billing — with tradeoffs worth knowing.
The parallel-run migration checklist — from spotting the cancellation traps to reconciling your first batches before you cut over.
Network caps, disclosure and registration, the no-debit rule, and a state landscape that keeps shifting — what to verify before you switch it on.
Durbin mandates two networks per debit card. Least-cost routing picks the cheaper path — and on a debit-heavy business, the cents compound.
Two programs, two rulebooks. The compliance lines, the 3% credit cap, and the margin math behind shifting card cost to the card.
Nobody gives away hardware. A line-by-line teardown of the lease, PCI, and early-termination fees hiding inside "free."
A dispute isn't a refund — it's a refund plus a fee plus staff time plus account risk. The economics at scale, and the mitigation ROI.
"Zero fees" is a real outcome and an overused slogan. The honest mechanics, where it's allowed, and the founder's rollout playbook.
The lead briefing, in full: the three-layer fee stack, why "interchange discounts" don't exist, and the only line you can move.
One briefing at a time, in plain numbers. Interchange, routing, dual pricing, chargebacks — what they actually cost and how to move them.
Written for founders of $5M+ businesses. No spam, no fluff. Unsubscribe anytime.
