Merchant account providers must charge fees to cover their costs for extending their services, so there's no way to avoid them entirely. However, businesses can reduce exposure to fees by using cost-minimization strategies—including lowering their chargeback rates, shopping around for better processing rates, and negotiating enterprise discounts.Business owners can also use zero-cost payment processing, which passes the processing costs onto the customer. With this type of processing, a surcharge is automatically added to credit or debit card transactions to cover the merchant's fees.