Dharma Merchant Services

Dharma Merchant Services has been selling merchant accounts since 2007, when Jeff Marcous and his daughter Alexia founded it in San Francisco. It is a registered ISO/MSP of Synovus Bank in Columbus, Georgia, and the mailing address it publishes today is 41 Watchung Plaza in Montclair, New Jersey. Merchant Maverick reports that the underlying processing runs on Fiserv and TSYS. Dharma says it became a Certified B Corporation in 2009 and, in January 2012, one of California's first legal Benefit Corporations. It also says it gives a share of profits to nonprofits its own customers choose. Six people are listed on the team page, which tells you the scale of the operation.

Pricing and how it works

Almost nobody in US merchant services publishes their markup. Dharma does, on a public page, broken out by industry. Retail, restaurant, lodging and healthcare accounts pay interchange plus 0.15% + $0.08 per authorization on Visa, Mastercard and Discover, and 0.25% + $0.08 on American Express. Ecommerce and other card-not-present accounts pay 0.20% + $0.11, with American Express at 0.30% + $0.11. B2B follows the same split: 0.15% + $0.08 card present, 0.20% + $0.11 card not present. Nonprofits get the best numbers on the site, 0.10% + $0.08 in a storefront or 0.10% + $0.11 online. Merchants processing over $100,000 a month drop to 0.10% on the percentage side. The account fee is $20 a month, or $15 for nonprofits. Interchange and card assessments pass through at cost. A chargeback costs $25 and closing the account costs $49. The list of fees Dharma says it does not charge runs longer than the list it does: no annual fee, no monthly minimum, no PCI compliance fee, no early termination fee, no batch fee, no AVS fee, no regulatory fee and no virtual terminal fee.

Who it is for

The monthly fee is the filter. Dharma's own low-volume page says the account works best at volume levels of at least a few thousand dollars a month, and points smaller merchants at Square or PayPal instead. Merchant Maverick puts the practical floor closer to $10,000 a month. Above that, a nonprofit taking donations online or a retailer with steady card volume will usually beat a flat-rate aggregator by a wide margin. The MX Merchant gateway, virtual terminal, mobile processing and online reporting come with the account at no extra charge. Authorize.Net costs more. Card-present merchants are normally funded the next business day and card-not-present merchants in two, depending on which platform your merchant ID sits on.

What Dharma is not

It is not a high-risk shop and it does not sign international merchants. Merchant Maverick notes that high-risk applicants get referred out to PaymentCloud rather than underwritten in house. It is also not a technology company. Phone support runs weekday business hours on Pacific time, the gateway belongs to someone else, and there is no marketplace splitting, no multi-currency and no developer platform of its own. What you are buying here is honest arithmetic and a phone that gets answered, not a product roadmap.