The fees that we are being charged by Quickbooks to process credit cards for your purchases has shot up to 4.5%. As you know we pass along this charge rather than mark up your purchases. Because of this we are encouraging you to make purchases with other means such as ACH or Check. Misty and Missy will be contacting your accounts payable person to provide the ACH information that you’ll need.
If your merchant fees have not shot up yet, brace yourself because it’s coming. Let me explain why.
In October new PCI DSS rules took effect. In case you didn’t know PCI DSS is a security system designed by VISA and the other credit card companies to reduce their fraud losses. The new rules require sellers that accept physical credits to have a machine that can read chips rather than scan. When a card has a chip they must use the chip to process the card or incur higher fees. All cards will have chips pretty soon. The chips are so far unbreakable and this reduces the credit card companies liability for fraudulent charges to near zero. But if you don’t process a card with the chip, then the seller is liable for any fraud.
If like HCS you never physically see the credit card, you are called a card not present transaction. Canada, Europe, Australia and most of the world really have been using the chip for a few years. This experience shows that where the fraud shifts to is card not present transactions. This is why we’re getting hit with the high fees. It’s so VISA can cover their losses from fraudulent charges. As I mentioned above if your merchant processor hasn’t raised your rates yet, they are going to very soon.I didn’t think it would be happen this quickly but here we are.
So the time has come to make the change to ACH. The good news is that transactions are still fast and they cost less.
– Amy Babinchak, Harbor Computer Services
Need to catch up on our previous blog posts? https://www.harborcomputerservices.net/?page_id=201
