Anyone use Charge.com/Authorize.net/iPayment? Have you recently been sent a letter about data scanning and the new $20/mo. charge from Scan Solutions? I cancelled my account immediately - it's ridiculous.
I wrote about this a few weeks back: http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/archives/336 The worst part about it is that it has no effect on PCI compliance. Completely ridiculous, profit padding move by ipayment.
Actually, to expound on this a bit, this is something that was done by iPayment across the board. It has nothing to do with Authorize.net as they can be used with just about any processor. I'm not sure if charge.com uses iPayment exclusively, but any processor that does, would also require a similar compliance fee. Also, this is only applicable to online merchants that are not PCI compliant. PCI compliance is required for every business, so regardless of who you end up processing through, it's a good idea to get compliant. The level 4 merchants like yourself are getting hit with this, because Visa/MC decided to make level 4 merchant liability fall on processors and not necessarily the business. Level 1, 2, and 3 merchant have been required to get compliant for a while now, and would have incurred a penalty if they did not. There is no penalty for level 4 non compliance.
If you call iPayment you can get out of it pretty easily. In fact, Scan Solutions has a little form on their website, a "self survey" that if you complete it with the proper answers they'll forward information to iPayment and eliminate the $20/mo. charge. I cancelled my account anyways because their fees were ridiculous, as was the statement fee. Just FYI, if you call them and say you're going to cancel because of the fees they'll reduce them, by a 1/3rd in my case - I still wanted to cancel though, but those of you who are planning on keeping the service I recommend that you call in and haggle a bit.
Check out Costco.com (Yes, the membership warehouse!). We've used the merchant services for well over 8 years. They are using Nova (recently changed names) which is a top tier provider. They have some of the lowest rates in the industry as well, 2% is for non-swiped transactions (online and phone orders). For the internet gateway, we use Authorize.net.