Online merchants and web portals/sales sites often find a processing company and (often) a gateway for online processing when they first begin and then feel stuck with that solution for the duration. Fees from some of these merchant gateways can be pretty steep. Especially for online purchase transactions, which have a high fraud rate that processors control by charging higher fees to the merchant.
TransFS.com wants to change how merchants find their processor and empower businesses with the ability to let processors compete for their business.
The idea is awesome and definitely empowering, allowing the business owner to shop around easily for better terms and rates. With online processing and merchant services being a well-established and normal way of doing business today, it’s good that tools like TransFS are showing up to give businesses a better way to find the services they need to conduct business.
The way it works is simple. The business owner fills out a form with the information you’d normally give to a merchant gateway to set up an account: percentages of online, mail order, and phone transactions (card-not-present) and on-site (card present) as well as monthly sales volumes and average transaction size.
Processors then bid for your business, giving their most competitive offer. These are shown to the business owner by TransFS in a side-by-side comparison list for easy decision making.
Amazingly, TransFS beta series showed an average of 40% savings in fees from testers who switched from their current gateways to new processors found through the site. TransFS monetizes through fees paid by processors competing on the site for new business and the site is free to use by business owners/entrepreneurs.
TransFS was founded in 2008 and recently received grant from the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (CEC) on October 13. The startup is based in Chicago, Illinois and also recently released their free iPhone app (OS 3.1 or later) for processing credit cards through an iPhone. The app is unique in that it can be used through any merchant gateway, so it is not tied to one provider.
TransFS is definitely one to keep your eye on.
