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Quote:To get the best deal, retailers must be prepared to go shopping among the many processors—or transaction acquirers in payments lingo—vying for their business, and to examine every rate and fee in the contract, says Allen Weinberg of payments consulting firm Glenbrook Partners.

“The guiding principle is that everything is negotiable,” Weinberg says. “But it’s important to keep in mind that every acquirer has a profitability target they feel they must meet. If you win on a couple of points, they will likely try to make it up in another area.”

The acquirer will likely emphasize the rate it charges on a standard Visa or MasterCard credit card purchase—2.2% of the transaction amount plus 30 cents is a typical charge for midsized online merchants. But that won’t be the rate on every transaction, because the Visa and MasterCard interchange rates—the fees acquiring banks pay to card-issuing banks—are higher on certain kinds of plastic, such as rewards cards and corporate cards. And some acquirers will add their own mark-up to the higher fees on those cards...