How merchant service charges actually break down
Every card transaction carries three layers of cost: interchange (paid to the card-issuing bank and set by Visa/Mastercard by card type and MCC), scheme fees (paid to Visa/Mastercard) and the acquirer margin (your provider's revenue). Add authorisation, refund, chargeback, PCI and minimum monthly fees and you have the full picture of what a transaction really costs.
Blended pricing rolls all of this into a single rate per transaction type, which is convenient but almost always more expensive, especially for businesses with a high mix of debit, contactless or commercial cards where interchange is genuinely low.
Interchange+ vs blended vs IC++
Interchange+ (IC+) splits out interchange + scheme as pass-through cost and shows your acquirer margin as a single transparent number. IC++ goes further by separating scheme fees as their own line. Both let you benchmark properly, see the impact of card-mix changes month to month, and negotiate on the margin number, which is the only one your acquirer actually controls.
For most retail, hospitality and professional-services businesses processing over ~£10k/month, moving from blended to IC+ pricing is the single biggest fee saving available, usually before changing terminals or provider at all.
Terminals, online checkout and integrated EPOS
We match terminal hardware to how you actually trade: countertop for till-based retail, portable (Bluetooth + Wi-Fi) for table service, mobile (4G + SIM) for trade and delivery, and Soft POS (tap-on-phone) where you don't want a separate device at all.
For e-commerce and bookings we cover hosted payment pages (lowest PCI scope), drop-in components and full API integrations with 3-D Secure 2 and dynamic-currency conversion. EPOS-integrated payments, sending the basket total straight to the terminal, eliminates miskeys and reconciliation work for retail and hospitality estates.