Accepting credit cards is crucial for any merchant but the obvious downside of this are the associated credit card processing fees which can amount to significant chunks of change. Usually fees range anywhere between 2 percent and 4 percent. Startup TransFS is hoping to help businesses sort through this issue by offering a comparison shopping website for credit card processing fees.
On TransFS, businesses submit information about their transactions including the percentage of online, in-store, mail-order and phone transactions; the merchant’s current credit-card processing fees; and monthly volume of sales and average transaction size. This is all variable information used by processing firms when determining fees for a particular merchant.
Once a merchant submit the form, their “auction” will begin. They will be presented with a series of competing bids from credit card processing companies and can review each proposal and select the bid that saves the most money. Bids are presented side by side to help users compare offers more easily and TransFS will also show businesses how much they will save vs. the fees associated with their existing credit card processing service. It’s a fairly simple and transparent process.
TransFS says that from the data collected from beta testers, their comparison engine can save businesses and average of 40 percent from their credit card processing. Another comforting feature is that TransFS vets all bidders in the site to make sure the the companies can put the money where their mouth is, so to speak.
The engine is completely free to the business or merchant and generates a small revenue from the processors if, and only if, a business chooses a new processor. And TransFS won’t pass on any merchant contact info to the bidders on the site until the business chooses a winning bidder (at which point the site only passes the info on to the winning bidder), assures TransFS’s co-founder and COO Eric Olsen.
Olsen says that TransFS will eventually extend its comparison shopping engine functionality to help companies compare employee health insurance fees, payroll processing, and property insurance. TransFS faces competition from lead-gen sites like BuyerZone.
