The Fojo Brief

PCI compliance sounds like a bureaucratic maze, and processors don’t help by charging vague “compliance fees” without explaining them. For most small merchants, though, the real obligations are manageable once someone explains them plainly. Here’s what you actually have to do, and why it protects you.

A chargeback isn’t a refund — it’s your customer going over your head to their bank to reverse a payment, and it can cost you far more than the sale itself. Here’s how the process actually works, why “friendly fraud” is a growing problem, and the concrete steps that protect your business.

Almost every complaint I hear about processing costs traces back to one thing the owner never understood: how their pricing is structured. There are three models — interchange-plus, tiered, and flat-rate — and the one you're on decides how much room your processor has to profit at your expense.