The standard advice for shopping card processing is to collect a few quotes, divide each one's fees by sales, and take the lowest effective rate. It is easy to do and it is what almost every "how to shop your processor" article recommends. It is also the reason "shop your rate" advice is often noise: effective rate is driven by your average ticket as much as by the pricing itself, so it ranks quotes by a number your own business distorts, not by the markup you would actually pay.
Two merchants on character-for-character identical processor pricing will show effective rates nearly a full percentage point apart if one has a $10 average ticket and the other a $200 one, because the flat per-transaction cents spread over very different amounts of sales. Compare effective rates across two different quotes on your business and the distortion runs the other way too: a quote with a lower percentage and a higher per-transaction fee can look cheaper or more expensive purely from where the two components happen to land on your ticket size.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| What's my current effective rate? | Either one — total fees divided by total sales is arithmetic, not analysis. |
| Is a lower quoted effective rate actually cheaper on my own volume and ticket size? | This tool — it re-prices your statement's actual volume and transaction count under the competing quote, in dollars, instead of comparing two blended percentages. |
| How much of my bill is network interchange nobody can discount, versus my processor's own markup? | This tool's pass-through and markup bands — effective rate alone cannot separate the two. |
| Are the flat monthly fees (statement, PCI, gateway, batch) folded into the comparison? | This tool — they are priced as their own line item on both sides. A bare effective-rate comparison usually ignores them. |
| Does the comparison need my current processor's rate sheet? | No, on either — but this tool estimates pass-through from your volume and card-present share, so it never needs it. |
This tool needs no account and nothing installed: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and your numbers stay on your device — there is no network request in the page at all, so nothing about your card volume is ever sent anywhere.
It is the standard advice, and it is easy to follow: divide fees by sales for each quote and pick the lowest. The problem is not the arithmetic, it is what the number contains. Effective rate blends a percentage-of-sales component with a flat per-transaction fee, so two processors charging identical markup will show different effective rates on the same merchant if the quotes carry different per-transaction fees — and the same processor will show different effective rates on two merchants with different average tickets, even at identical pricing.
Not by itself. A quote with a lower percentage and a higher per-transaction fee can cost more on a business with a low average ticket and less on one with a high average ticket, and effective rate alone does not show you which. This tool separates the pass-through every processor charges from the markup that is actually negotiable, then re-prices your own statement's volume and transaction count under a competing quote, so the comparison is a dollar figure on your own mix rather than two blended percentages from two different merchants' worth of pricing.
No. You need five numbers off a statement you already have — card sales, transaction count, total fees, roughly what share was card-present, and the flat monthly fees — and the markup percentage, per-transaction fee, and monthly fees of the quote you are comparing against. The tool estimates network pass-through from the volume and mix, so it never needs your current processor's rate sheet.
No. It names no processor, and the comparison field accepts whatever markup, per-transaction fee, and monthly fees any quote states — there is nothing here that favors one company's pricing over another's.