Credit Card Surcharging Technology and Compliance: What Automated Tools Actually Handle for Dealerships
Surcharging has a reputation for being complicated, and that reputation is not entirely undeserved. Between card brand rules, state-level restrictions, and disclosure requirements, it’s easy to see why some dealership owners avoid the topic altogether rather than sort through the details. Technology has made surcharging more manageable to administer day to day, but it’s worth […]
Cloud-Based Payment Systems vs. Legacy Terminals: A Decision Framework for Dealership Leaders
Every dealership eventually faces some version of this decision: stick with the countertop terminal that has worked fine for years, or move toward a cloud-based payment system tied more closely to point-of-sale and dealer management software. Neither option is automatically the right answer, and framing it as simply “old versus new” tends to obscure the […]
Contactless and Mobile Payments in the Dealership Service Drive: What Decision-Makers Need to Know
A customer picks up their vehicle from the service bay, taps their phone against a reader, and is back in their car before the advisor has finished printing the paperwork. Moments like this have become common enough that most customers barely notice them anymore — but for the dealership on the other side of that […]
Fee Creep in Dealership Payment Processing: How Real-Time Data Helps You Catch It Early
Fee creep is the gradual, often unnoticed increase in what a dealership pays to process card transactions — a small rate adjustment here, a new line item there, a reclassification that quietly changes how a batch of transactions gets priced. None of it tends to look dramatic in isolation. Collected over a full year across […]
How to Read a Merchant Statement: What Modern Reporting Technology Reveals About Your Dealership’s Processing Costs
A merchant statement is the monthly bill your payment processor sends for the privilege of accepting credit and debit cards — and for most dealership controllers, it might as well be written in a foreign language. Line items are abbreviated, fees are bundled together, and the total at the bottom rarely explains itself. If you’ve […]