Credit Card Processing for Small Business

Credit card processing is the backbone of modern commerce. Over 80 percent of consumer spending in the United States is now done with credit cards, debit cards, or digital wallets. If your business cannot accept card payments efficiently and affordably, you are losing sales to competitors who can. Understanding how credit card processing works — and how to get the best rates — is essential for any business owner.

Every credit card transaction involves four parties: the cardholder (your customer), the merchant (your business), the issuing bank (the bank that issued the customer's card), and the acquiring bank (the bank that processes the transaction on your behalf). The payment processor — Unison Payment Solutions — acts as the intermediary that connects your business to the acquiring bank and card networks. When a customer taps, inserts, or swipes their card, the transaction flows from your terminal to the processor, through the card network to the issuing bank, and back with an approval or decline — all in under 2 seconds.

The fees you pay on each transaction are divided into three components: interchange fees (set by the card networks and paid to the issuing bank), assessment fees (small fees paid to Visa, Mastercard, etc.), and the processor markup (the fee charged by your payment processor for handling the transaction). With interchange-plus pricing, you see all three components separately on your statement, which is why it is called “transparent pricing.” With flat-rate pricing (like Square's 2.6% + 10¢), all three components are bundled into a single rate — which almost always costs you more.

Unison Payment Solutions uses interchange-plus pricing because it is the fairest, most transparent pricing model in the industry. You pay the actual wholesale interchange rate on every transaction — the same rate that every processor pays — plus a small, visible markup that covers our services. There are no hidden fees, no inflated rates on certain card types, and no surprise charges on your monthly statement. This model saves the average business 20 to 30 percent compared to flat-rate processors, and the savings scale with your volume — the more you process, the more you save.

Beyond pricing, Unison provides the complete credit card processing infrastructure your business needs: POS terminals and card readers for in-store payments, payment gateways for eCommerce and online invoicing, mobile card readers for on-the-go processing, virtual terminals for phone and mail orders, and recurring billing systems for subscriptions and memberships. Every solution comes with PCI compliance support, fraud prevention tools, chargeback management, and next-day funding as standard features.

Getting the best credit card processing rates starts with understanding your current costs. The single most effective step you can take is to request a free rate comparison from Unison Payment Solutions. Send us a recent processing statement and we will provide a line-by-line analysis showing exactly what you are paying in interchange fees, assessment fees, processor markup, and junk fees. We then show you what your costs would be on our interchange-plus pricing model — with no obligation and no commitment.

Beyond switching to interchange-plus pricing, there are several strategies to lower your effective processing rate. First, encourage card-present transactions whenever possible — chip and contactless payments qualify for lower interchange rates than key-entered transactions. Second, use Address Verification Service (AVS) and CVV verification on all card-not-present transactions to qualify for better rates and reduce fraud. Third, if you process B2B transactions, ensure your system passes Level 2 and Level 3 data to qualify for commercial card interchange rates that can be 0.5% to 1.0% lower than standard rates. Fourth, consider our cash discount program to eliminate 100% of your processing fees by passing the cost to customers who pay with cards while offering a discount for cash payments.