You know the old adage, “there’s a cost to doing business”? It’s true! If your business accepts credit cards, one of those costs is interchange. Interchange fees are transaction fees that you must pay whenever a customer uses a credit or debit card to your goods or services.
The card brands, Visa and MasterCard, set interchange rates and there is very little you as the merchant and processors like Gravity Payments can do. However, there are different types of credit card transactions that offer benefits if you choose to utilize them for your business.
- Level 1 transactions – general credit card transactions. If you’re currently taking credit cards, you are accepting level 1 transactions
- Level 2 transactions – specific to corporate and purchasing cards. These transactions require additional data like tax information and customer numbers.
Level 2 transactions offer benefits that allow you to save on your interchange fees. Let’s dig into that piece a bit more.
Interested in reducing interchange fees associated with corporate and purchasing cards? Gravity Payments offers automated level 2 transactions through our Interchange Management Service for our integrated merchants. Our team is here to help you learn more.
Understanding Level 2 Transactions
If your business currently processes a fair volume of corporate and purchasing cards, automating level 2 transactions is one of the few ways you can work to take control of the processing fees set by the card brands. Taking advantage of lower rates, ultimately reducing the costs associated with processing these types of transactions benefits your business and allows you to keep more money in your pocket.
It’s important to understand that there are additional steps and information required when utilizing level 2 transaction processing. This information is required for each corporate or purchasing card transaction. While this may add time to the checkout process, you will see an immediate savings to your processing fees. This information traditionally consists of:
- Customer Code
- Tax Amount
- Tax Identification
While this is not a full list and it can vary depending on the card issuer, you can expect to retain a healthy savings of the additional information. However, with Gravity Payments’ Interchange Management Service (IMS), our system will automatically assign the cardholder the required customer number and tax information required for transactions to qualify for Level 2.
If you do input customer data for a level 2 transaction, you can rest assured that any data you input will not be overwritten, we simply fill in the gaps, while still providing you savings associated with accepting Level 2 transactions.
Getting Started with Automated Level 2 Transactions with Interchange Management Service
To take advantage of the benefits outlined above, it’s essential to choose a payment processing solution that supports automated Level 2 transactions. Gravity Payments offers this functionality to our integrated merchants via our Interchange Management Service (IMS). We take the load off by having Level 2 transactions set up within your Gravity Payments Dashboard by handling that for you. Gravity Dashboard allows you to view all transactions, regardless of their level as well as pull any and all transaction data with the click of a mouse.
Interested in learning more about Interchange Management Service for your business? Contact the Gravity Payments team today.
