Nowadays, many people prefer to open small business merchant account considering the benefits and added features that comes along with it. Small business merchant account will enable your business to accept credit cards from your customers. Nowadays, internet has made so many things possible. If you want to grow the size of your business, you have to give more options and facilities to your customers when they are doing any purchase from you. You want to keep them as regular customers. With the help of small business merchant account, you will be able to give more payment options to your customers.
Credit cards have made it possible to do any kinds of purchase online. If you have a small business merchant account, your customers will get more flexibility from you and pay for the items with a credit or debit card. If you have this kind of account, you should be able to get payments from your customers in different ways like echecks or by online ACH authorization.
In order to expand your business, you must have a small business merchant account and accept the major credit cards like MasterCard, VISA, American Express, and Discover cards. This will increase your sales potential and you will have more customers to do business with. Once the customer has decided to purchase an item from you, either he can make payments by echeck or ACH or by credit card or debit card. You will get the money deposited into your small business merchant account within two to three business days if the payment is done by credit or debit card. When you swiped the credit card of your customer, money earned that day can be sent to your business checking account. The monthly statements at the end of month make tracking sales volume and deposits into your account easier. The credit card terminals or software for processing payments can be purchased outright or leased.
You also have other advantages of opening a small business merchant account. You can open up future capital opportunities for your business and you don’t have to go through the complex loan application process. You may be able to obtain advances based on the number of the credit card receipts from month to month. This way you have more access to fast cash that can be used for pressing needs. You will get a lot of buying power for your business and this will definitely help in the expansion and growth of your business.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 4:56 am and is filed under Merchant Account. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
If you are a new web based business with an ecommerce feature, I’m not sure I would run right out and get a merchant account. Paypal works well for small sales volume and can be scaled for larger volume. They also have a built-in software gateway. The standard vanilla paypal account has not monthly minimum fee (although their per transaction fee is not cheap). The fees for a merchant account and online credit card gateway to a processor such as authorizenet can be high. Once you get bigger, something like authorizenet might become useful over paypal but it takes more IT assistance (read investment) to get going.
I own several websites and I think paypal works to start out, I made the same mistake of getting a merchant account on www . lingerieissexy.com but eventualy it works out.
I agree with both Joe & Andrew. PayPal is a reliable service for small online companies.
Keep one thing in mind if you are thinking about using “PP”- you need to know if PP is widely used by your target audience. Those who participate in ebay or are involved in Web site promotion generally use PP and have PP accounts. If PP is not popular with your prospects, you may find resistance.
I work in an office and my boss asked me to do some research on merchant accounts
and research I have done, and while there tons of people willing to offer what appears to be sound advice, I can only find out how to set up an account through a service OR an account to accept credit cards over the web. The merchant account that my boss is looking for is one that does not go through a service (a bank would be good) and is not an ecommerce acount,one with a physical machine in the office for the customers to run their cards through.
Any help would be most apriciated thank you