Merchant Account Pricing

There is no question that the acquisition and use of a merchant account is a wise decision for your business. Since your main goal as a businessperson is to increase your sales, speed up the receipt of your funds and simplify your business record keeping, choosing the right merchant account provider will allows you to accomplish all three tasks.

The most important thing to realize is that you will want to choose a merchant account provider rather than a bank. Merchant account providers understand the latest technology needed for the operation of an online or ecommerce business. Banks can certainly provide merchant accounts, and many of them do, but then proceed to contract with one of the major merchant account providers for additional services. You may as well go directly to the merchant account service company and save the bank fees which would have been tacked onto the merchant account service company fees.

One of the first things to review when you are selecting the right merchant account provider is their track record. Check with the Better Business Bureau report. If there are many negative items on a report, particularly in dealing with customer relations, you will want to consider carefully whether this particular merchant account provider is one which you want to use. Since you are the customer in this case, your peers are the ones who are filing negative reports.

A merchant account provider which offers a money-back guarantee is one which is confident in their ability to perform the tasks required of it in a professional and courteous manner. You should be able to give the merchant account provider a trial service period during which your money can be refunded if the company is simply not doing what you expected it to do.

The customer service and technical support practices of the merchant account provider are very critical when it comes to choosing the right service provider. The technical support team and customer service people should be accessible to you 24 hours per day and seven days per week. After all, your ecommerce business customers come from around the globe from all different time zones and schedules.

Another important factor in choosing the right merchant account provider is pricing. Review the fee schedules carefully. There should be no annual fee, programming fee, installation fee, setup fee or application fee. Don’t allow yourself to be sucked into signing a lease, or into paying extraordinarily high equipment costs.

There are many legitimate merchant account providers out there, and most are ready and willing to provide good service for their customers. Those who are leaving out essential customer services are the ones who are cutting corners; so if the price is significantly lower than that of other providers, make sure you can live without receiving the missing services.

You also need to review the policy of the merchant account providers in regard to international customers, monthly caps and reserve amounts. If you expect to be receiving orders from international customers, you’ll want to make sure the merchant account provider allows you to process international transactions through your merchant account. Monthly caps can prevent you from being able to process all your transactions during a calendar month if they are set too low. It is preferable to go with a merchant account provider who doesn’t limit you with monthly caps on the number of transactions which you can process.