Spokane, Washington, United StatesFact-checked August 31, 2026
PayTrace Review
BPayTrace is a Spokane-area payment gateway built for businesses that sell to other businesses and to government. Its differentiator is automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture, which can qualify commercial and purchasing card transactions for materially lower interchange. It publishes no rate card, and the processing rate you actually pay is set by whichever merchant services provider sells you the account.
- Founded
- 2004
- Headquarters
- Spokane, Washington, United States
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Best for
Distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers and government suppliers with a high average ticket and a customer base that pays on commercial cards; businesses that need Level 2 and Level 3 data handled automatically rather than entered by hand; merchants who want a gateway that integrates with an existing ERP or accounting system.
How it scores
Pricing2.5
Features4.0
Ease of use3.5
Support3.5
Contract3.0
Reputation score3.5
What others rate them
Details →- BBB
- null
The takeB
If a meaningful share of your revenue arrives on corporate, purchasing or government cards, PayTrace does the one thing that matters most in that niche — it captures and transmits the extra data fields that qualify those transactions for lower interchange, without asking your staff to key anything additional. That is a narrow strength, but it is a real one, and the savings are arithmetic rather than marketing. The trade-off is opacity: PayTrace does not publish pricing, and because most accounts are sold through resellers, two merchants on the same gateway can be on very different deals.
Skip if you
You are a card-present retailer or restaurant with consumer customers and small tickets — Level 3 optimization does nothing for you, and a full POS or an all-in-one processor will cost less and do more. Also skip it if you need a published, self-serve price before you will talk to anyone.
Chapter 1
Should you choose PayTrace?
The headline take, the audiences it's right (and wrong) for, and the genuine differentiators behind the verdict.
About
PayTrace is a Spokane-area payment gateway built for businesses that sell to other businesses and to government. Its differentiator is automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture, which can qualify commercial and purchasing card transactions for materially lower interchange. It publishes no rate card, and the processing rate you actually pay is set by whichever merchant services provider sells you the account.
Pros, cons, and audience
Pros
- Automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture is genuinely built in, not a manual field your staff has to remember — for commercial and purchasing card volume that is a direct, recurring interchange saving.
- Purpose-built for B2B and B2G sellers rather than retrofitted from a consumer product, which shows in the invoicing, AR and ERP integration work.
- Long operating history in the same niche — the company dates to 2004 and has stayed in Washington State with its own support team through the change of ownership.
- Reachable phone support is a real differentiator in the gateway category, where ticket-only support is the norm.
- ACH acceptance sits alongside cards, which matters when a single invoice is large enough that even optimized card interchange is the wrong instrument.
Cons
- No published pricing whatsoever — no gateway monthly fee, no per-transaction fee, no setup fee. Every quote is a sales conversation.
- Because most accounts are sold through resellers, your processing rate, contract term and any early termination fee are set by that reseller, so the PayTrace name on the gateway tells you nothing about the deal you are on.
- The BBB shows the company as not accredited with a C+ rating, and both complaints on file over the last three years describe an account the merchant asked to close that kept being billed — one for more than a year.
- Nothing here helps a card-present consumer retailer; the interchange optimization that justifies the product only applies to commercial card volume.
- Now part of the North group, so the independence that some long-standing merchants originally bought is gone, and the gateway is positioned as North's preferred rail.
What makes them different
The genuine differentiator
Automatic Level 2 and Level 3 interchange optimization is a checkbox on many gateways and a genuine specialization at PayTrace. The company has built its product, its integrations and its support organization around B2B and B2G sellers rather than treating them as an afterthought to a consumer-facing business.
How we score it
2.5
Pricing Transparency
4
Feature Set
3.5
Ease of Use
3.5
Customer Support
3
Contract Terms
3.5
Industry Reputation
Chapter 2
What it costs
Real-world cost at three volumes, plus the rates, fees, payouts, and contract terms that drive them.
Pricing details
What PayTrace is
PayTrace is a payment gateway founded in 2004 and run from the Spokane area of Washington State. It has spent its entire existence pointed at a single, unglamorous problem: businesses that sell to other businesses and to government agencies pay more in card interchange than they need to, because qualifying for the cheaper commercial-card rates requires sending data most systems never collect.
North American Bancard — now trading as North — announced its acquisition of PayTrace on 18 March 2022 and made it the group's preferred gateway. At the time of the deal PYMNTS reported PayTrace as processing more than $30 billion in payments annually. The brand survived the acquisition intact: the site still runs under its own name, the support team is still in the Pacific Northwest, and the product roadmap has stayed on B2B rather than being folded into a general-purpose stack.
The Level 3 argument
Card networks price commercial, corporate, purchasing and government cards in tiers. Send the transaction bare and it clears at the most expensive rate. Send it with tax and customer-code data and it may qualify for Level 2. Send it with line-item detail — product codes, quantities, unit of measure, freight and duty — and it may qualify for Level 3, which on a large ticket can be a difference worth a great deal of money over a year.
The catch has always been that nobody wants to type all that. PayTrace's answer is to pull the fields automatically from the integration or the invoice, so the optimization happens without a change in how staff work. That is the honest core of the product, and it is why the company is worth considering even though its pricing is opaque.
Scale
PayTrace states on its own site that it serves more than 40,000 merchants and settled more than $46 billion in 2023, and that it has been PCI-validated for twenty years. Those are company-published figures for a year that is now some way behind us, and we have not seen them independently audited; treat them as an indication of order of magnitude rather than a current scoreboard.
What it costs
This is the weakest part of the proposition. PayTrace publishes no rate card at all. The gateway is sold both directly and through a partner network of several hundred resellers, and in the reseller model the merchant services provider sets the processing rate, the contract term and any cancellation fee. Two businesses using an identical PayTrace screen can be on wildly different economics.
If you are quoted a PayTrace-based account, insist on seeing three numbers separately: the gateway subscription, the per-transaction gateway fee, and the processing markup over interchange. A quote that fuses them into a single blended percentage is hiding something, and in this category it is usually the markup.
Reputation
The picture is mixed but not alarming. Software directories carry a small number of user reviews that skew positive, with reviewers repeatedly citing responsive phone support and clean reconciliation — both non-trivial in a category where support is often a ticket queue. The Better Business Bureau, by contrast, lists PayTrace LLC as not accredited with a C+ rating. Complaint volume there is genuinely tiny: two complaints in three years. But one of the two went unanswered, and both describe the same failure — a merchant asking to close an account and being billed anyway, in one case for over a year and about $10,000 before a partial refund followed BBB involvement. Two complaints is not a pattern. It is worth knowing which way the one pattern points.
Who should look elsewhere
Nothing about PayTrace helps a coffee shop. If your customers are consumers paying with consumer cards, Level 3 optimization is irrelevant to you and you are paying for a specialization you cannot use. The same goes if you want to see a price before you take a sales call — that is a reasonable thing to want, and this is not a company that will give it to you.
Contract Terms
Cancellation Process
PayTrace is sold both directly and through a reseller network of several hundred partners. When it is sold as part of a merchant account, the contract length, cancellation terms and any early termination fee come from that merchant services provider, not from PayTrace — read the processor's agreement, not the gateway's marketing, before you sign.
How to terminate your account
Chapter 3
What you actually get
Products, integrations, payment-type coverage, security posture, and how their support holds up in practice.
Products & Services
gateway
PayTrace Payment Gateway
Hosted gateway for card-not-present and card-present acceptance, with a virtual terminal, payment links, e-invoicing, recurring billing and a documented API.
Key Features
- Automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture
- Virtual terminal for phone and mail orders
- Payment links and e-invoicing
- Recurring and scheduled billing
- API and ERP integrations
invoicing
Trace AR
Accounts receivable automation layered on the gateway — invoice presentment, customer self-service payment and reconciliation for B2B sellers carrying terms.
ach
Trace ACH
Bank-to-bank ACH acceptance for invoice payments, aimed at large-ticket B2B transactions where card interchange is expensive even after Level 3 optimization.
payment processing
PayTrace Merchant Services
Full merchant account sold directly by PayTrace rather than through a reseller, using the North group's processing back end.
Support & Contact
Chapter 4
What others say
Synthesis of third-party platform reviews and industry ratings — agreements, disagreements, and which signals to weight.
Platform Ratings
Aggregated Trust Score
Based on 0 reviews across 1 rating platform
0.0
out of 5
Overall Rating
Better Business Bureau
0 reviews
Reviewer Notes
The BBB lists PayTrace LLC with a C+ rating and shows it as not BBB accredited. The complaint file is small — 2 complaints in the last three years, 1 closed in the last twelve months — but 1 of the 2 went unanswered, which is what drags the rating down. Both complaints describe the same thing: an account the merchant asked to close that kept being billed, in one case for more than a year and roughly $10,000 before a partial refund was offered after BBB intervention.
Chapter 6
Common questions
Frequently Asked Questions
General
North American Bancard, which now trades as North, acquired PayTrace on 18 March 2022. PayTrace still operates under its own name from the Spokane area with its own support team, and its website identifies it as "a North company". North is reviewed separately on this site.
Pricing
Features
Setup & Onboarding
Contracts & Terms
How we evaluated PayTrace
We evaluate every payment processor independently — Payment Review does not accept paid placement. Our analysis combines hands-on product testing where possible, public pricing and policy documents, third-party reviews from BBB, Trustpilot, Google, and G2, and employee feedback from sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. We update reviews on a rolling cadence and flag the next review date so readers know how fresh the analysis is.
Last fact-checked August 31, 2026
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Corporate relationships
Who PayTrace is connected to. Worth knowing before you treat any of these as an independent second quote.
- Parent company
- North (North American Bancard) · since March 2022
Acquisition announced 18 March 2022, when PayTrace was reported to be processing more than $30 billion in payments annually. PayTrace still runs under its own name from Spokane with its own support team, and is positioned as North's preferred gateway.
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