This is an industry standard and would be the same no matter what processing service you used.  manually-entered, keyed-in transactions are at higher risk than swiped transactions. If you swipe or dip a credit card, the cardholder is assumed to be standing in front of you, and you can easily verify their identity by asking to see their ID and checking their signature. With manually-entered transactions, you could be entering the card information over the phone or Internet, making it harder to verify that you’re accepting payment from the owner of the card. This riskier situation makes credit card networks nervous, so they put measures in place to protect against such transactions, including higher fees. Therefore, credit card providers (Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) charge more in order to protect against fraud.  But we have negotiated to get an industry low fee of 3.5% with zero transaction fees, entry fees, or other hidden costs on all cards.