charged whenever they accept a credit card. In most cases, all transactions that are not qualified or mid-qualified will fall to this rate. This may happen for several reasons such as: A consumer credit card is keyed into a credit card terminal instead of being swiped and address verification is not performed A special kind of credit card is used like a business card and all required fields are not entered A merchant does not settle their daily batch within the allotted time frame, usually past 48 hours from the time of authorization. A non-qualified rate can be significantly higher than a qualified rate and can cost the provider much more in interchange costs, so the merchant account providers do make a markup on these rates. Six-tier pricing As a result of the Walmart Settlement and to compete against PIN-based debit cards (which are processed outside of the Visa and MasterCard networks), Visa and MasterCard lowered the interchange rates for debit cards well below those for credit cards. Some providers can pass on the lower cost of these cards directly to merchants. Consequently, the three tiers programs have added two classifications for debit cards that are processed without a PIN or with a PIN for a total of six rate classifications. Interchange-plus pricing Some providers offer merchant account services priced on an "interchange plus" basis. These accounts are based on the "interchange" tables published by both Visa and MasterCard MasterCard. This type of pricing creates a discount rate by adding interchange rates plus a percentage and authorization fees. This is a common pricing model for very low and very high-average tickets. Authorization fee The authorization fee (actually an authorization request fee) is charged each time a transaction is sent to the card-issuing bank to be authorized. The fee applies whether or not the request is approved. Note this is not the same as a transaction fee. Transaction fee The transaction fee is charged when you accept your authorization. This fee only applies to an authorization that is accepted without error. Statement fee The statement fee is a monthly fee associated with the monthly statement that is sent to the merchant at the end of each monthly processing cycle. This statement shows how much processing was done by the merchant during the month and what fees were incurred as a result. Many times, the statement fee is not directly linked to