Take payments on your website without overpaying

To take payments on your website, you need a payment gateway: the online equivalent of the terminal at your counter. The gateway captures the card, encrypts it, checks it for fraud, and passes the approved sale to your merchant account. Online sales are card-not-present, so they carry higher interchange than an in-person tap. That part is real and unavoidable. The markup stacked on top is the part you can still control.

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway is the software that securely takes a card on your website and sends it for approval. It does three jobs: it collects the card number in a secure field, it runs fraud and address checks, and it hands the transaction to the processor for settlement. You can embed it in your own checkout, or use a hosted checkout page where the customer is handed off to a secure page and sent back after paying.

• Hosted checkout: the customer completes payment on a secure page the processor hosts. Least work for you, and the card data never touches your servers.
• Embedded fields: the payment form lives on your site but the sensitive fields are isolated, so the checkout matches your site without you holding raw card numbers. (Style it to match; keep the card data walled off.)
• Full integration: your developers connect directly through an API for custom flows, subscriptions, and saved cards. More control, more responsibility.

Why do online payments cost more than in person?

Online payments cost more because the card is not physically present, which the networks treat as higher risk. When no one can dip a chip or tap a phone, there is more room for fraud, so interchange for card-not-present sales runs roughly 0.2 to 0.5 percent above the equivalent in-person rate. That is a network cost, set by Visa and Mastercard, and no processor can waive it away. Anyone who claims online rates as low as in-person is blurring interchange with markup.

Online interchange is genuinely higher than in-person. The markup does not have to be. We charge the same flat dime per transaction online as we do at the counter, and it never goes up.

This is where the markup matters even more than in person. Because online interchange already runs higher, a processor that also stacks a fat percentage on top compounds the pain. A flat dime does not. On a 60 dollar online order, the interchange is what the network charges for a card-not-present rewards card, and our markup is ten cents, the same dime as any other sale. The gap between that and a percentage markup widens on every larger order.

How do I keep online payments secure?

Keep online payments secure by never storing raw card numbers yourself and letting the gateway do the sensitive handling. The basics that actually matter: use a gateway that tokenizes cards so you store a token, not the number; keep your checkout on HTTPS; turn on address verification and the security-code check to knock out obvious fraud; and stay current on PCI requirements, which apply to online sales too. We describe PCI accurately and keep your account aligned, though no one can promise a specific compliance outcome for how you build your site.

• Let the gateway tokenize. You keep a token that is useless if stolen, not the real card number.
• Run AVS and CVV checks. Matching the billing address and security code filters a lot of junk before it settles.
• Watch for card-not-present chargebacks. Online disputes lean on you to prove the order was legitimate, so keep delivery and authorization records.

The plain read: online is a bit more expensive to accept than in person, and no processor changes that, because interchange is the same everywhere. What you can change is whether a percentage markup rides along and grows with every order. If your current online rate is already lean, the analyzer will tell you to stay put. If it is a blended percentage hiding a wide spread, a published dime is usually the cheaper way to sell on your site.