Originally Posted by Rand

The Visa registration fee is not about your sites. You can have one site or thousands of sites and the fee is the same. It doesn't matter if you have half yours sites exclusively at one biller and the rest at another or all of them with two billers in a cascade. The fees have nothing to do with sites.

The fee is to be registered at Visa with each processor. There is an initial registration fee of $750 per processor and an annual renewal of $400. The fee (at the time of this post) is only charged in the US and not for clients based in the EU.

If you use two US IPSP's then you must pay two registration fees, and each year thereafter pay two annual renewal fees.

These fees are charged by Visa and collected by the IPSP's and paid to Visa on behalf of sponsored merchants. Any billing company which claims to be able to process clients in the US without collecting registration fees is either in direct violation of Visa's rules, or, is absorbing the fees as a cost of acquiring clients. The former of which won't last long and the latter is a losing proposition.

If you cannot justify the additional sales you would gain (from using a secondary billing company in a cascade) against the amount of the fees, then adding a secondary biller may not be for you.

I hope this answers the question.