What To Consider When Opening A Merchant Gateway Account
A merchant gateway account gives you a fully integrated online payment solution, together with your storefront and shopping cart software. The ability to take credit card payments online is no longer an optional benefit, it is now a total necessity. The days of website owners asking people to mail paper checks to pay for products and services are virtually over, and it rare now to even see check payments being offered as an alternative. Setting up your website to take credit card payments need not be difficult or time consuming, depending on the complexity of the solution you need.
If you are in business selling purely on the Internet, you can start without a merchant account. Services such as PayPal, 2Checkout and ClickBank give you the chance to sell online, although each of these has some kind of restriction. ClickBank is purely for sellers of digital download items, and is restrictive for small growing businesses in that you are only paid from your account on a monthly basis. PayPal gives you a lot more freedom, but PayPal accounts are often limited and even suspended when there is unusual activity, even though that activity may have a perfectly sound reason.
PayPal is also restrictive in the countries which are able to use it fully. 2Checkout is a lot more international friendly. In many cases, you will be able to accept PayPal payments through 2Checkout when you would not be able to accept them directly. These solutions are all that many online retailers feel they need in order to start and build up their business. Of course, having a fully fledged merchant account creates the image of being a legitimate, established business, because most customers know that these accounts are not easy to get.
It can be difficult to qualify for a bank merchant account, and even if you do qualify you may be subject to very high transaction fees as the bank will view Internet commerce as a high-risk activity. It is often better to work with a company which is a specialist in online card processing. In many cases, you can get the shopping cart software and the gateway service as an integrated package. This avoids any compatibility issues, even though it is usually possible to get shopping cart software packages to support the gateway you are using.
It is important to ensure that the merchant gateway account you are using has a high enough degree of security to protect against fraudulent transactions. While total protection is impossible, there are steps which can be taken to vastly reduce the potential problems you may face. The first of these is to make sure that the CVV number is required on all transactions where the customer is not present. Address Verification System will also help to reduce fraud. You are taking a big step, so make sure you are as well protected as possible when you apply for your merchant gateway account.
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