Chip and tap transactions are the lowest-risk payments that exist — and interchange prices them that way. If your effective rate looks like an online business's, your processor is keeping the difference.
Card-present interchange is the cheapest there is, but flat-rate and tiered pricing quietly bill your tap-and-chip transactions at card-not-present-style margins.
A $300 terminal leased at $40/month for 48 non-cancellable months is a $1,920 terminal. Equipment leases are the single most predatory corner of this industry.
Retail owners run lean and busy. Processors know the statement gets filed unread — which is where the margin creep and junk fees live.
A retail store doing $60k/month in tap-and-chip volume should see effective rates among the best in the industry. Every tenth of a percent above that is pure processor margin on transactions with almost no fraud risk. Over a year, the gap between a matched retail account and a default one routinely funds a holiday season's worth of inventory.
Retail is where transparent interchange-plus pricing shines brightest: your transactions are low-risk and uniform, so the real costs are knowable and the markup is starkly visible. That's exactly why so much retail processing is sold on flat-rate and tiered models — those structures are where the extra margin hides.
Our retail review is quick because the category is clean: statement in, effective rate out, market comparison against processors who compete hard for card-present volume. We'll also sanity-check your equipment situation — owned vs. leased terminals, PCI fee status, and whether your hardware locks you to anyone (most modern terminals don't, despite what reps imply).
If you're also weighing dual pricing or surcharging, we'll give you the compliant version for your state — for some retail profiles it offsets nearly the whole processing line.
A short set of questions about your business, your volume, and your situation. No documents needed yet, and nothing touches your credit.
Free • No hard credit pullA placement specialist reviews your answers against our processor network and walks you through the realistic options — which underwriters fit your profile, at what terms, and why.
No obligation • Plain EnglishOnce you pick a direction, we help you prepare and submit the application so it lands right the first time — and we stay with you until you are approved and processing.
Hands-on until you are liveA single processor can only offer you their box. We map your profile across an entire network and show you where you actually fit best.
Approvals are not luck. They are about presenting the right business, the right way, to the right desk. That is the part we do every day.
Blind applications create declines on your record, and declines make the next approval harder. We aim you once, at the right target.
Matching is half the job. We help with the application, the documents, and the follow-up until money is actually hitting your account.
When we place you with a processor, that processor pays us a referral fee. You don't pay us anything — not for the survey, not for the call, not for the application help.
Here's why that works in your favor: we work with dozens of processors, so we have no reason to push any particular one. And we only keep getting paid if you stay with the placement — a merchant who leaves in 90 days costs us money. Our incentive is literally to set you up to win. If we can get you to win, we win too.
Usually not. Most modern terminals can be re-programmed to a new processor, and where replacement is genuinely needed, hardware is cheap enough now that it shouldn't drive the decision. If anyone's main pitch is a “free terminal,” read the lease terms twice.
Leases are notoriously hard to exit — most are non-cancellable with assignment clauses. The honest play is usually: run out the lease while fixing the processing rate (they're separate agreements more often than reps admit), and never lease again. We'll read yours and tell you what's actually possible.
It shouldn't, if your processor underwrote you correctly — seasonal swings only cause trouble when the account wasn't set up to expect them. We'll match you with processors comfortable with your pattern so December doesn't trigger a risk review.
No. The call is a working session: we review your survey answers, show you which processors realistically fit your profile, and explain the trade-offs. If none of the options beat what you have, we will tell you that and part as friends. Pressure placements come back to bite us — merchants who feel pushed do not stay, and we only get paid when you stay.
The survey and the alignment call involve no credit check at all. A credit check only happens if and when you decide to submit an actual application to a processor — and we will tell you exactly when that step is coming, before it happens.
Nothing. Processors pay us a referral fee when a placement succeeds and sticks. You will never get an invoice from us.
Three minutes and a statement. We'll show you what card-present volume like yours gets on the open market — and the cleanest path to it, hardware included.
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