ShopKeep gets into payment processing with Payment Revolution acquisition

ShopKeep is fleshing out its point of sale offering with its acquisition of Payment Revolution.

The company is a point of sale provider that also offers inventory, staff tracking, analytics, payment processing software. Starting today they’ll also offer credit card processing.

ShopKeep chief executive Norm Merritt says that their transaction fee model is very different from most payment processors, which offer a flat rate. In contrast, ShopKeep will charge merchants at a flexible rate based on their average ticket price, the industry they operate in, their monthly transaction volume, and whole sale cost of the payment processing. To a merchant with an average ticket price of $30, that could mean a 2 percent transaction fee — slightly under what Square offers.

Merritt says ShopKeep also doesn’t lock merchants into any kind of contract.

Since it was founded in 2008, the company has on-boarded 16,000 merchants and Merritt says Payment Revolution is on track to do a billion dollars in transaction volume this year.

However, the company operates in a very crowded space among players like Square, Amazon, PayPal, Poynt, and First Data’s Clover. Over the holiday season last year, Square announced that its merchants did over $100 million in sales in a single day, leaving people like me to wonder about the company’s overall transaction volume. Meanwhile larger players like First Data, which owns the sleek point-of-sale system Clover, reported processing $63 billion in transaction volume worldwide in 2014.

Though ShopKeep is confident its alternative processing fee will win over merchants, they may find that shop owners like the stability of a set fee.