Unless you process an enormous amount of payments, you're going to be dealing with a reseller, because the banks don't want to deal directly with small fries, a

Unless you process an enormous amount of payments, you're going to be dealing with a reseller, because the banks don't want to deal directly with small fries, and $250 million USD per year can still be seen as a small fry in the payments industry. So the reseller is going to mark it up a bunch. Plus, there are multiple rates (called interchange): a plain credit card is one rate, a card with points/miles is a slightly higher rate, a corporate card, - still higher, and a corp card with points/miles - higher still. That's just one card type (say MVS/VISA), there's another set of interchange rates for AMEX, another for Discover, etc. If you want to see this in action, talk to the people at you local bank about processing credit cards, or call intuit about one of their dongles. The interchange rates are part of the contracts. The per tx fees (the $0.30 part) are built up out of several layers of the transaction including fraud review, and there may only be a nickel of profit built in on that side. I think that all the providers are charging the same because they are trying to attract small businesses (SBs) SBs are notoriously price conscious, and if you go a tenth of a point higher, or three extra cents per tx, they'll use your competitor. So all the processors are priced about as low as they can go, and are trying to compete on features. They might all use the same reseller.