Payment processing guides for Canadian merchants

Four shelves — pricing, terminals, online payments, security and compliance — and three ideas underneath all of them. Settle those first and the rest of the collection reads as variations rather than as separate subjects.

Browse by topic

Pricing & transparency
Interchange-plus, effective rate and statement reading.
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Terminals & in-person
Hardware, Tap to Pay and lane throughput.
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A RapidCents online checkout in a browser, with contact and card fields on the left and an order summary on the right showing the subtotal, tax and total, plus the accepted card brands.
Online & integrated
Checkout, gateway and recurring billing.
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Security & compliance
PCI DSS, fraud and chargebacks.
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What order to read these in

First, the effective rate — not the quoted one
A quoted rate describes one kind of transaction. What you pay is the average across every transaction you actually took — different card types, different ways the card reached you — plus the charges that arrive per month rather than per sale. The effective rate is total fees divided by card volume, and it is the only figure two processors can be compared on, because it is the only one that does not depend on which transactions you choose to count. Settle this before anything else: much of the pricing shelf is, underneath, an explanation of why your effective rate is not the number you were quoted.
Then the split: the networks set interchange, your processor sets the markup
A card fee is not one fee. Interchange goes to the bank that issued the card and is set by the card networks; assessments go to the networks themselves; the markup goes to your processor. Only the last of those is quoted differently by two providers competing for the same business, which is why negotiating a rate means negotiating the markup and very little else. Once that is clear, pricing models stop being brand names and become a question of disclosure: interchange-plus prints the network cost and the markup as separate lines, while flat and tiered pricing deliver them combined — flat as one rate, tiered as the two or three the processor sorts your transactions into. Read a single pricing guide with that in mind and the rest of the shelf goes quickly.
Then what changes when the card is not there
A card tapped or inserted at a terminal proves it was present. A payment keyed in, taken over the phone or made through a website cannot, and that one difference moves interchange, fraud exposure and who absorbs the loss on a disputed charge. It is why the same card can cost you two different amounts on the same day, why remote selling comes with tools that in-person selling has no use for — 3-D Secure, address checks — and why the security shelf is a pricing subject as much as a compliance one. Anyone selling through more than one channel should settle this before opening a channel-specific guide.
Only then, the shelf you came for
With those three in place, the four shelves stop being four subjects. Pricing and transparency is the effective rate applied to your own statement and to the models a processor can offer you. Terminals and in-person is a hardware decision taken downstream of where your customer hands you a card — a counter, a table, a doorstep. Online and integrated is that same decision for sales you never see in person, where the real question is how to ask for the money: a checkout, a link, or an invoice. Security and compliance is what follows from the card-not-present line: fraud, chargebacks and PCI DSS, the parts of card acceptance that usually get attention only once something has already gone wrong. Each shelf lists newest first rather than easiest first, which is why the short list of starting points below is worth more here than the top row.

Where to start

Credit Card Processing Explained: Parties, Fees, Pricing
The orientation to read first if the vocabulary is the obstacle. It names the parties to a card transaction, the fees each of them takes, and the pricing models those fees get packaged into — enough scaffolding to read anything else here without stopping to look a term up.
Flat-rate vs. interchange-plus pricing: an evidence-led comparison
The comparison to have read before a sales call. Flat rate is one price for every card and easy to forecast; interchange-plus itemises the network cost and the processor’s margin separately. Each side is written as a trade-off, so you can tell which one your volume and average sale argue for.
How to Save on Credit Card Processing Fees
Open this once the split matters to you. It separates interchange, network assessments and processor markup, then works through the part a merchant can actually move — the markup — along with consolidating processors, preventing chargebacks and watching a statement for fee creep.
How to Read a Merchant Statement
Do this one with last month’s statement in front of you. Five lines — volume, total fees, interchange, markup, fixed charges — and a method for spotting the sixth that nobody explained to you.
Interchange-Plus Pricing Explained
The model itself, at statement-line level: what interchange-plus prints on the page, what a blended rate prints instead, and what happens to each one when the networks move interchange.
Card-Present vs Card-Not-Present: Why the Same Card Costs You Different Amounts
Read this if you sell through more than one channel. It explains why a tapped card and a keyed one are priced differently, how fraud liability shifts between them, why some remote payments sit better than others, and what to do about the ones you cannot move.
Can I Rent a Card Reader Instead of Buying One?
The terminal question most merchants ask first. Renting against buying, judged on business stage and cash flow rather than sticker price, plus the two costs that only surface later: processor lock-in and replacing a device once the warranty is over.
Payment Links vs Checkout vs Invoicing: When to Use Each
The front door to selling remotely. Three ways to ask for money — a checkout, a link, an invoice — and the kind of sale each one suits, so a deposit does not end up travelling through a shopping cart.
7 PCI Compliance Myths That Cost Merchants Money (or Get Them Breached)
Start the security shelf here rather than with the standard itself. Seven beliefs that cost merchants money, including two of the most expensive: that a processor’s compliance covers the merchant, and that card data is not being stored when it is.

Questions that come up across these guides

Why is the deposit in my bank account smaller than the day’s card sales?

Two things separate them, and neither is an error. Fees come out before the money arrives — netted out of each transfer or billed as a monthly total, depending on your agreement — and a deposit covers a settlement batch rather than a calendar day, so the transactions inside it are not the ones your point of sale rang up between opening and close. Refunds, chargebacks and per-month charges then pull the two figures further apart. The place to settle it is a statement rather than a rate quote: the statement itemises the fees and the deposits against the same month, which is the only view in which the two figures can be made to agree.

Do I still have to be PCI compliant if card numbers never touch my systems?

Yes. PCI DSS applies to every business that accepts cards, whatever its size. What hosted payment pages and validated terminals change is scope, not obligation: when card data never reaches your own systems the self-assessment is shorter, and most of what is left concerns staff, devices and process rather than infrastructure. The compliance your processor holds covers your processor — it does not cover you, and assuming otherwise is one of the misunderstandings the security and compliance shelf exists to take apart.

What is the difference between a payment gateway and a payment processor?

A gateway carries the transaction; a processor moves the money. The gateway is the layer that takes card details from a website, an app or a virtual terminal and passes them into the payment chain securely, which is why it exists for remote selling and has nothing to do at a terminal where the card is tapped. The processor sits behind it, routing the authorization out to the card networks and the issuing bank and then settling the funds to your account. Plenty of providers supply both, so a single price can be paying for two jobs — worth knowing when you are comparing quotes line by line.

Do I need a merchant account of my own, or is a payment app enough?

Both give you a merchant account; what differs is whose name it is in. An aggregator signs you up underneath a shared account, which is why sign-up is quick and the price is the same for everyone on it. An account underwritten in your own name takes an application, and in return the pricing can be set against your own card mix rather than against an average of everyone else’s, and the reporting can be broken out by location, device and channel. The practical test is volume and mix: one fixed price is cheap while your transactions look average, and stops being cheap when they do not.

Are all of these guides written for the market my business operates in?

Only the ones you can see, and that is deliberate. A guide whose subject is a national rule, a tax regime or a domestic debit network cannot be made correct somewhere else by swapping a few words, so guides like that are published only in the market they describe rather than adapted for another. The counts on the shelves above are what actually applies where you are reading, which is why the same shelf holds a different number of guides in different markets. Everything on this page is in scope for you.