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.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1685145,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"D"}']

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.