Why B2B processing costs more, and the part you can fix.
A business customer paying with a corporate purchasing card is one of the more expensive transactions you can accept. It is also the only kind where supplying extra data moves it into a cheaper published category, which most B2B merchants have never been told.
What this page settles.
Three questions, in the order most people ask them.
Why your rates look worse than a shop’s
A business that sells to other businesses accepts a different mix of cards, and the mix is the whole explanation.
Commercial, corporate and purchasing cards cost more at interchange than consumer cards. They carry more risk, more administration and more features for the cardholder’s employer, and the published categories reflect it. A corporate purchasing card is one of the more expensive things you can accept.
More of your transactions are card-not-present. Invoices paid by phone, card details emailed over, payments taken through a portal. Card-not-present starts in a dearer category before anything else happens.
So a B2B merchant comparing their effective rate with a retailer’s is comparing two different card mixes, and the gap is mostly not about who negotiated better. This is worth knowing before you conclude you are being badly treated — and equally worth knowing before you accept that nothing can be done.
The one advantage you have
Something genuine is available to you that is not available to a retailer: the cheaper categories that commercial cards unlock when you send more data.
Level 2 adds a purchase order or customer code and the sales tax amount. Level 3 adds full line-item detail. Supplying them can move a commercial card transaction into a materially cheaper published category. The full explanation is here.
Two things about it are worth stating plainly:
It only works on commercial cards. Sending extra data on a consumer card changes nothing. This is the one place where B2B is structurally advantaged.
It only reaches you on the right pricing model. If you are on tiered pricing, a transaction qualifying for a cheaper category does not make your bucket cheaper — the saving stays with the processor. For a B2B merchant, that is probably the single strongest argument for interchange-plus there is.
Most B2B merchants send nothing beyond Level 1 and have never been asked about it. Starting with Level 2 is a small change and captures a real part of the benefit.
Average ticket changes the arithmetic
A retail merchant with a nine-dollar average ticket should care intensely about per-transaction fees and relatively little about basis points. A B2B merchant invoicing four thousand dollars at a time has the opposite problem.
Run it on your own numbers. A dime per transaction on a $4,000 invoice is 0.0025% — irrelevant. A quarter of a percent of markup on the same invoice is $10. For you, the percentage is everything and the per-item fee is rounding.
Which means a quote built to appeal to a retailer — very low per-item, higher percentage — is the wrong shape for you, and the quote that looks worse at a glance may be considerably cheaper. The worksheet for comparing properly is the same one everyone should use, but the line that decides it is different for you.
Invoicing, terms and getting paid
Three practical points that are specific to selling on terms.
Card-on-file and recurring billing. If you bill the same customers repeatedly, the card vault matters more than almost anything else in your setup, because it is what makes a future switch easy or painful. Gateway choice is the decision underneath it.
Payment links on invoices. Convenient, and worth checking how they are priced — some platforms charge per link or per invoice as well as per transaction.
ACH as an alternative for large invoices. On a four-figure invoice, a flat ACH fee is usually far cheaper than any percentage. The trade is slower settlement and a payer experience some customers dislike. Offering both, and steering the large ones toward ACH, is a reasonable structure rather than a trick.
Your terms are a cost too. A card paid on receipt versus an invoice paid in sixty days is a working capital difference that frequently dwarfs the processing fee. Worth holding in view when somebody offers to save you twenty basis points.
What to ask a provider
Five questions, and a provider who sells to B2B merchants regularly will answer all five without hesitation.
- Do you support Level 2? Do you support Level 3? Two separate questions.
- What share of my volume is commercial cards, from my statement?
- Is interchange passed through at cost? If not, the answer to question 1 does not help me.
- What is the markup, as a percentage? For my average ticket, this is the number.
- Can you show me transaction-level evidence that Level 2 data arrived? Capability and configuration are different things.
If the conversation is mostly about per-item fees and free terminals, you are being sold a retail package.
What we charge
Interchange + 0.50% + 10¢ in person, interchange + 0.75% + 25¢ keyed, interchange passed through at cost. For a B2B merchant the relevant number is the 0.50% or the 0.75%, and it is stated rather than bundled.
Send us a statement and we will tell you what proportion of your volume is commercial cards, which categories it is landing in, and what Level 2 alone would be worth to you.
While we are on the subject
Should B2B merchants use interchange-plus?
Almost always, for two reasons. Commercial card costs vary widely by category so a bundled rate has to be priced for the worst case, and interchange-plus is the only model where qualifying for a cheaper category actually reduces your bill.
Can I surcharge business customers?
Surcharging rules apply the same way regardless of who the customer is, and state law applies the same way too. Commercial customers do tend to be less sensitive about it, which is a commercial question rather than a compliance one.
Is ACH cheaper than cards for B2B?
For large invoices, usually yes, because ACH pricing is typically a flat amount rather than a percentage. The trade is slower settlement and a less convenient experience for the payer.
Why is my average ticket working against me?
It usually is not. A large average ticket makes per-transaction fees irrelevant and percentage rates dominant, which is the opposite of a retail merchant’s problem and changes which quote is best for you.