[Symbiote]

Does paying by cheque have additional charges? I'm surprised it's common enough to need a "facility".

Paying by credit card or an electronic transfer presumably doesn't need an office of people shuffling paper around.

(I haven't used a cheque since about 2010, and I've never seen them used between businesses.)

[clintonb]

I don’t know of any merchants that charge extra for check processing. Depending on the volume and average value of the checks, processing fees may be cheaper than credit card interchange.

Check processing typically has a fixed cost per check. This may fluctuate at lower volumes, but the price plateaus as you reach 10K checks per month. Say you get to $2 per check, and interchange is 1%. The merchant retains more revenue for check payments over $200.

The downsides are it takes 2-3 additional days to get the revenue, and there is no notion of a “dispute” for checks. In the case of fraud, you lose. However, there is less risk of this happening in B2B sales, which is the primary use case for checks these days.