Most likely the best you're going to do is to approach your bank and talk to them about their merchant program. Some banks will offer this as effectively a loss leader. Here's more than you probably wanted to know about Merchant Processing. Hopefully this keeps you from making a bad decision, like contracting with First Data for five years.

The key piece of info to know before shopping is that there are dozens of card programs and damn near that many discounts. The discount is what V/MD/D/AMEX charges the processor to use their network. A debit card is priced differently than a no-rewards credit card which is different than a rewards credit card which is different than a business credit card. AMEX is priced different depending on whether the merchant subscribes to AMEX directly or whether they subscribe to them through their processor. The basic elements of the price the merchant pays are the discount and the profit to the processor. If you're talking to a sales person about their processor then that's a layer of profit that has to be paid. If that sales person doesn't work directly for the processor then they work for an ISO (Independent Sales Org) and that's another layer of profit. Understand that the discount doesn't change but every layer of profit costs you more money.

The other piece of info is to NOT sign a long term contract to lease a terminal. First Data has screwed more companies than you can imagine with 5-year terminal leases at $30/month for a piece of equipment that other processors would sell for $300. Do the math, it's a terrible deal but once you're locked into that hardware lease they know they've got you locked into their processing deal as well.

Pricing breaks basically three ways:

1. Flat rate pricing. This is what you have with QuickBooks and what Square has. You pay the same discount for every transaction. The only variation in that is card present or not with the latter being about .5% higher. FWIW there is a lower price to be had in QB/Intuit based on dollar volume but I don't think you'll qualify for it. Square and Intuit/QB charged about 2.75% discounts plus a nominal transaction fee. In a B2C environment they know that a percentage of those will be high cost reward cards and a percent will be dirt cheap debit cards. If I had to guess I'd say their effective price is 1% to 1.5%. It's not much higher than that and I tell you why I know that later.

2. Tiered pricing. Think of the various discounts on a line graph. From the cheapest which is a debt card to the most expensive which is the highest rewards cards and business purchasing programs. Tiered pricing takes that line and breaks it up usually into four segments then prices all transactions in that "tier" the same. So you might see cards with discounts from 2% to 2.5% at 2.4%, for example. This is a staple for First Data as it's a difficult program to decipher what you're really paying and it sets them up well to downgrade any given charge after the transaction is run. Those downgrades cost you money.

3. Interchange Plus. Unless you're doing strictly B2B sales this is virtually guaranteed to be the cheapest you can get. Go back to the effective pricing comment in 1 above. Debit transactions are priced at a very low discount, .8% or lower and sometimes a whole lot lower. Like .15%. Conversely credit cards are priced at 1.25% or more, sometimes well over 3%. With Interchange plus pricing the merchant pays exactly what V/MC/D/AMEX charges the processor plus a fixed markup. I've seem that markup be as high as 1% and I've seen it as low as .1%. The latter will come from your bank as a loss leader to get your banking relationship.

The end result of all of this is that the fixed price companies like Square and Intuit/QB cannot possibly be the cheapest and they aren't really trying to be. Square has used the profits from their processing to create a really, really good POS universe that has served a lot of small businesses really well. Intuit/QB builds it into their software because when you do it that way the bookkeeping in QB is done for you. I have a few clients on recurring charge and all I had to do was set it up one time and it does the rest for me. It generates the invoice, processes their card on file, deposits the cash and posts the payment and deposit into my QB file automatically, every month without fail. Neither of those two need to be the cheapest because that's not what they're selling.

The Tiered pricing companies are crooked and I'd stay as far from them as I can. NEVER LEASE HARDWARE!!! If you need a desktop terminal buy it outright. They aren't that expensive.

The Interchange plus companies are the way to go IF you're big enough that the roughly $25/month fee is worth it. I know a business owner than charges her customers a once per month subscription that averages into the hundreds of dollars. It's B2C and a good number of her clients use Debit. The end result is effective pricing any given month that is 1.1% to 1.3%. In an Intuit/QB world she's paying 2.75% for each of those charges. She bought her processing from her bank who really wanted the checking and lending relationship. At her volume of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year she's saving a HUGE amount of money versus a Square or Intuit/QB.

OK, that's a ton of info. If you have questions respond here and I'll keep up with this thread. I've put in place and broken a lot of merchant deals over the years and know more than I care to admit though I just admitted a lot of it here. I'm more than will to share that info and help a fellow Ag evaluate what's in front of them before they sign anything.