Price To Use SeekerWorks.NET

We have partnered with Helcim for our (and your) payment processing needs. They offer some of the lowest online credit card and ACH processing fees available. They offer in-person rates as well, with the purchase of their card readers or payment terminals (i.e., no rental fees). In either case, they offer "interchange-plus" pricing.

All registered charities can lower their rates even more (even lower than PayPal!) Registered charities are determined by the card brand networks. To qualify for charity interchange rates, a charity or social service organization must fall under the merchant category code (MCC) 8398 when they create their own merchant accounts with Helcim.

For example (using the details below), with ACH processing, Helcim charges 0.5% + $0.25 per transaction, with a cap of $6.00 (even lower than PayPal!) So a $500.00 gift using ACH would be $2.75. Of course, if the donor were to pay with cash or check in person, or through their bank's bill pay service, the cost would most likely be $0.00. But in today's world, many people don't carry cash or use checks anymore.

As for credit cards, if the charity interchange rate for Visa was 1.35% + $0.05 per transaction, the highest interchange plus fee for an online Visa (US) transaction of $500.00 using Tier 1 would be 1.85% + $0.30, or $9.55. If the charity interchange rate for Mastercard (US) was 2.0% + $0.10, the highest interchange plus fee would be 2.5% + $0.35, or $12.85.

If you are a charity and your merchant category code (MCC) is 8398, then you will likely qualify for the rates below. These are rates from the card brands who will lower their interchange fees (again based on the MCC code) for credit card transactions processed by those charities (Note: these rates are from the linked Helcim guide as of 4/30/2024):

With "interchange-plus" pricing, your total processing cost would be a result of adding Helcim's processing margin to the interchange rate from the respective credit card brand, which includes a (%) rate and a per transaction ($) fee (see their fee-disclosures page for more information).

Helcim provides discounted rates based upon your monthly card processing volume. These discounts are divided into 5 tiers, and are automatically assigned to a tier based on a 3-month rolling processing average of all card-based transactions: