Seeing through the smoke and mirrors with Merchant Services

How many times have salespeople come to you with promises of savings? There is always some little fee or cost which they latch onto to convince you that they have a better deal. There are experts out there at finding a tiny charge and convincing you that they can save you hundreds on your monthly bill. The problem with that is that all of the providers start out with the same base cost from the main processing companies. So how much do you really think you could save? Do you trust your current provider? Do they do a good job for you? Do they give you real info when you need it or just more fast talk and obfuscation? These are the important questions you should be asking yourself when deciding who to do business with.
As a couple of examples I have two situations I would like to relate, the first deals with a client who was told he could save hundreds on his monthly bill by lowering his transaction cost by one or two cents. From $0.20 to $0.18 per transaction. To allow reality to intrude lets think about this for a second. By lowering your cost by $.02 you could save $100 if you had 5000 transactions. This client only had about 500 transactions a month. He might save that promised hundred dollars in ten months, not monthly as was implied. (Oh yeah and it cost him $250 to close his account.) For the second example lets look at the often made promise of no discount being charged for your Debit transactions. This one is a little more subtle in how you could be convinced. There is a system that you could be on which allows you to process debit transactions with no discount being taken my the credit card companies. Where it gets misleading is that they do not tell you there is a flat rate which replaces the discount and, depending on what your average transaction amount is, could actually cost you more than the discount system would have cost you.
I guess the Bottom Line is you should do your homework (and the math) and talk to your provider before making any decisions in a hurry when it comes to switching companies.