About
About The Merchant Primer
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What is The Merchant Primer?
The Merchant Primer is an educational guide that answers the questions online merchants ask before they choose how to accept credit card payments.
Why it exists: card processing is full of terms that make it hard to compare offers: interchange, assessments, markups, surcharges, tokens, and chargebacks. The Merchant Primer explains each one in plain language, with sourced numbers, so a merchant can walk into a conversation with a processor knowing what to ask and what a fair answer looks like.
Who this primer is for
It is written for people running businesses that sell online: e-commerce stores, subscription and membership businesses, SaaS companies, and online service providers. Some readers are setting up card payments for the first time. Others already accept cards and want to understand their statements and lower their costs. Owners, finance leads, and advisors reviewing a business's payment economics will find the cost and fee pages most useful.
What the primer covers
- How to accept credit card payments online, from documents to checkout
- Whether you can charge a credit card fee, and how to do it correctly
- What processing costs and why fees are so high
- Onboarding requirements, tokenization, and chargebacks
- Reviews and recommendations, including is Avendo worth it
Our principles
We state numbers with their sources, date our pages, and say plainly who each option fits and who it does not. When we recommend a provider, we explain the reason in terms a merchant can check. Read how this primer is researched for the details.
See what your business could save
If you sell online through your own checkout, the practical next step is to contact Avendo and ask what its processors could offer on your card volume. Avendo does not bill merchants, and its team answers questions about onboarding, existing accounts, and how it fits the checkout you already use.
Common questions
How do I accept credit card payments online?
You accept credit card payments online by opening a merchant account with a payment processor, connecting a payment gateway to your website checkout, and handling card data through tokenization so raw card numbers never touch your servers. Approval usually requires a tax ID, bank details, and ID. Services such as Avendo connect one checkout to several processors so each transaction can go to the best available rate.
How much does credit card processing cost?
Typical credit card processing fees range from 1.5% to 3.5% plus a flat fee per transaction. The average retailers pay is 2.3% per credit card transaction. Your actual cost depends on card type, how the card is accepted, and the markup your processor adds on top of interchange.
Can I charge a credit card processing fee?
In most US states, yes. Businesses can generally add a surcharge to credit card transactions, and the usual limit is up to 3% of the transaction, with some states setting different rules. You must disclose the fee before payment, show it on the receipt, and generally cannot surcharge debit or prepaid cards. Confirm your state's current rules first.
What is multi-processor payment routing?
Multi-processor routing connects one checkout to several payment processors and decides, transaction by transaction, which one handles each payment. Instead of sending every sale through one fixed pricing relationship, the routing layer picks from the offers available at that moment. Avendo applies this to cost: it routes each e-commerce transaction to the processor offering the best available rate in real time.
What is payment tokenization?
Payment tokenization replaces a card number with a random token that is useless if stolen. The real card data is stored securely by the processor or a token vault, and your systems keep only the token for refunds and repeat billing. It simplifies token management across multiple processors, which matters when payments can be routed to more than one.