How Numerous Merchant Accounts Work
Having a merchant account may sound very tricky for those who have not examined all the possibility of maintaining more than one account. But it does make you save on merchant account fees and credit card processing charges. Remember that lowered mid and non-qualified surcharges make up most processing expenses that may well be skipped. For any factor that causes a credit card transaction downgrade, it sure contributes much to ballooning processing costs.
Understanding why you can benefit from having more than one merchant account will need you to consider the two general categories of merchant accounts. When you have a customer paying with his card at a retail store, that transaction falls under card-present. When you have a customer paying from a company’s web page through an internet credit card processing service, that transaction is card-not-present. So what has this got to do with mid and non-qualified surcharges making you save cash with many merchant accounts?
Downgrades will cut the surcharges when you have two merchant accounts if your business receives fairly equal volumes of transactions under the two categories. That’s because a transaction will probably go down to the mid or non-qualified discount rate tier in cases when a card-not-present purchase is entered in a card-present account. With many merchant accounts, you can keep off soaring surcharges and downgrades simply by processing transactions under the appropriate account.
Immediately considering to pay a higher rate combined monthly fees and discarding the possibility is the usual reaction to the idea of having more than on merchant account. On the other hand, this can easily be solved by getting all accounts with one merchant bank.
While it doesn’t happen very frequently, these banks and credit card processing companies may have technical difficulties resulting in on-and-off service. This translates to money lost as far as businessmen are concerned. When you have more than one account with different processors, you can avoid this downtime problem. But remember that what it takes to avoid these service disruptions by having more than one merchant account is still little compared to its benefits. Besides, these disruptions won’t be happening too often and you will have to pay for every merchant account you maintain.
Competition is usually the main challenge unless you become aware of the strategies of maximizing your sales while minimizing your expenses and this is applicable for every kind of business. Having said that, it is not easy to keep up with all these.