Did you think you had a flat rate fee for your American Express merchant account? I did too. But, there are circumstances where they can charge you more. Key entering a transaction at the point of sale is probably the most common.

Per the American Express April 2010 merchant guidelines PDF, “there are instances when Merchants will need to key-enter an In-Person Transaction. This occurs  most often when the POS System cannot read the Magnetic Stripe. There may be a fee assessed for Charges that are key-entered. See subsection 12.2.2,  “authorization fees.”
Transaction  fee - A fee applied to any Charge for which we did not receive the full Magnetic Stripe from the Card and the indicator as to whether the Card was swiped.
0.30% of the face amount of the Charge.

This should not come as a surprise. Visa and MasterCard have long had a different rate for key entered transactions on a RETAIL or swipe merchant account.

” One of the requirements of a key-entered Transaction is to validate the Card’s presence. Failure to
validate the Card’s presence can render the Merchant liable for Chargebacks if the Cardmember
disputes the Charge. “  This doesn’t change for any type of card and we’ve reported on this before.

Tags: american express, chargeback prevention, key entered

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 6:36 am and is filed under rates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.