Online Merchant Accounts – Behind Heroics
Any thread of likelihood that credit cards will be obsolete in the next few years is obviously on borrowed time. People will just not let that come about. These plastics have been around too long it’s hardly imaginable to live in a world without them. Some even think they don’t remember life before their first Visa or MasterCard. Or they’ll just feel fortunate to have come out with any level of sanity from any “cardless” age in their lives.
Bottom-line, we all need the freedom of a credit line that allows us to live life to the fullest while leaving a lot of leeway around our pockets.
The use of a credit card amounts to the classic business equation lending one side to a buyer and the other to a seller. Cyber sellers, in particular, cannot afford to refute their customers this convenience lest they run the risk of losing possible sales. After all, people shop on the Internet for the reason that they want to do everything there and they’ll probably hate the surprise of having to come down to a store or mail a check just to pay for something they saw on a half-baked cyber dealer’s website. Online shoppers want results they get from sitting in front of their PC and that means electronic payment services are a must for every online store. If you sell your goods on the web, this is how you look forward to the equation of electronic payments to make a distinction in your business.
On the other hand, this equation is barely equal and often tips to the favor of one side – consumers. Online merchants are particularly vulnerable as they don’t have the security of actual signatures verifying card users’ identity. While this shouldn’t be seen as a problem as consumer protection is a sign of a working democracy which is integral for any business to occur, web-based businessmen usually do lose from a consumer’s gain.
Take a dealer who accepts a credit card payment for a product he unsuspectingly ships to a customer who turns out to be anything but the legitimate card owner. Once the claim of fraud is established, the transaction will be deemed invalid. The card issuer thus refunds the legitimate card owner for his lost credit but will quickly redeem the amount by issuing a charge back to the store owner who made the invalid card transaction. If this store owner makes more invalid transactions, there’s even the risk of his contract being terminated by his merchant account provider. In other words, in the cause of consumer protection in this whole industry, the merchant takes the brunt.
Conceivably, the only way for online businessmen to recover some sense of balance into the equation is to perfect their instincts for smelling a probably deceitful transaction. Knowing their business inside out grows a skill for spotting irregularities such as suspiciously large purchase volumes, frequent data entry errors or even strange purchase timing. Since electronic payment service is indispensable for anyone who wants to remain in business online, it should be viewed as a welcome challenge rather than a burden.
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