Beginners Guide For Online Merchants
August 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Being able to accept credit cards will increase your sales and profits drastically. A facility such as this will be of great benefit, particularly for international clients, as well as impulse buyers. Impulse buyers see your product, get excited and want to make a purchase straight away. In addition to this it is much easier and faster for international clients to pay by credit card. Checks or electronic transfers can take valuable time. By then the client may have already changed their minds. A good purchasing solution will take care of all of these sales. What you need is a beginners guide to accepting credit cards online.
Sales can go up by two hundred to three hundred percent with the proper payment facilities. Getting a process like this up and running does not take long. Your payment facility could be active in days. Online businesses should not be without it.
Secure processing is not only professional, it also proves to be a much more secure way of conducting transactions on the internet. Your internet business cannot afford to be without purchasing facilities. Below is a simple beginners guide to accepting credit cards online.
First of all you will need to decide whether you are going to open a merchant account or make use of a third party. Should you wish to make use of an individual or business account, you will need to make inquiries at your local bank about implementing payments by card. Talk to them about different options and what their charges are. Be careful to avoid offers for “cheapest possible rates” as you have to focus on overall price to find the top rated online merchant account for your business.
Many companies in the market today are more than willing to conduct payments on your behalf. Third party merchants will normally charge a small fee, or a percentage of the sale for rendering the service on your behalf. Of course if you have your own account it means not having to share your profit.
Opening your own merchant account could be slightly more costly than making use of a third party. Some merchants do not charge a set up fee at all. The down side to using a third party merchant is that although your set up fees may be lower, your transaction fees will be much higher. It may decide that it may be a good idea to test the waters, and monitor how your sales increase for a couple of months. Of course you may already have a high volume of sales, so opening your own merchant account is viable.
Once you have decided which merchant account you are going to use, you will need to put an order form or shopping cart on your website. Most vendors have ready made forms which can be customized according to your needs. Once the facilities have all been set up, prepare to rake in the cash. If you are looking for the best internet merchant service for your company make sure to investigate the reviews available at BestOnlineMerchantAccounts.com, the only credit card processing review website currently available online devoted to the demands of online businesses.
Comparing Merchant Accounts - A Simple Way To Compare Merchant Accounts
November 6, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Being able to take credit cards is very important to any company wanting to actively sell products and services on the Net. At the dawn of online business it was thought that relying on credit cards was a bad idea, because it was forcing an offline system to the Internet. Various companies offered alternative payment methods such as “beenz”, but the web-based currencies didn’t flourish. The truth is, roughly a decade on from the people starting to sell on the web, still getting our plastic out of our wallets to buy on the web and accepting credit cards as payment for products online is still as important as ever.
There are basically two ways to accept credit cards online. Let’s compare merchant accounts. Businesses can either apply for their own merchant account, which allows them to process credit cards in their own business name, or they can go with a third party processor, who processed the credit card charges on behalf of the merchant. Obtaining a full merchant account has higher upfront costs, but has smaller per transaction costs. Using the services of a third-party service provider costs less initially, but has higher per item charges.
Making the decision as to whether or not to go for a full merchant card processing account or use a third party processor is simply a question of running the numbers. Let’s look at two different business types and compare merchant account benefits…
In most cases, merchants who are actively trading offline and simply want to expand online will be more suited to obtaining a merchant account. Most likely, Usually they will already have a real world merchant account and will expand the remit of that account to add the ability to do “MOTO”, which is “Mail Order Telephone Order” processing and only means that the cardholder is not present at the point of sale.
For one-person businesses starting to sell products online, it’s think about testing their marketing using a third-party solution. The advantage to the new business is that there’s hardly any upfront cost which means they can test their market easily and cheaply. If sales boom, they can eventually look to reducing the per-item costs by getting their own credit card processing account. If the market isn’t profitable, they can at least exit the market without having paid significant upfront costs to get their own merchant account.


