Your own merchant account

A merchant account is provided to you by a bank to enable you to take credit card payments. This does not have to be the bank who holds your business account - It pays to shop around to find the best deal.

There is normally an initial set up fee and a monthly rental fee for a processing terminal (swipe machine). We have seen set up fees from as little as £75.00 up to £300.00 + with terminal rental from as little as £1.00 per month up to £30.00 per month. The bank will also charge a percentage for each transaction. Again this depends on the bank and your business category. But it can range from 1.5% to about 5% per transaction. Debit cards such as Switch are cheaper to process -from about 0.10p to 0.30p per transaction.