Once set-up your merchant account plays a major role in your online business. Therefore you must be really careful when selecting an Internet merchant account provider. Check below factors to assess online merchant account services.
Rates – What are they going to charge on monthly basis or per transaction basis?
Customer Service – This is vital to keep your customers happy. Check their customer support hours, how easy or difficult to contact them, do they have a phone support (this is a must) and average response time for an inquiry.
Level of security – They must be PCI compliant. Credit cards must be processed in a highly secured technical environment. The processing must maintain the industry standard security levels. It must be equal to an online banking system.
Dispute resolution process – The merchant account provider must have a properly define process to resolve disputes and charge backs. This process must be part of your terms and conditions in the ecommerce website. Your customers must agree to your terms and conditions before purchasing from your website.
History – Check how long they have been in the business. Bad ecommerce merchant account services cannot survive more than a year.
Customers – Ask a list of customers that you can contact and verify the quality of their merchant service.
Type of cards – Some online merchant accounts accepts VISA and MasterCards only. This is limiting your ability to cater for a wide range of customers. It is always good to select an online credit card processor who accepts all major credit cards such as VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diner’s Club, JCB etc.
Exchange Rates – You may have customers who are paying from different currencies. Your ecommerce merchant account should finally convert all payments to your base currency. Bad merchant account providers can rip you off from the exchange rate. Always check their exchange rate and compare with the day’s standard rate. If there is a considerably big difference then it is not a good sign.
There are hundreds of online merchant account providers. Only few are reliable, maintain an outstanding service and satisfying our above selection criteria.
Here is a review of our top online merchant account providers.
2Checkout.com (2CO) is a worldwide leader in payment and e-commerce services. 2CO powers online merchants with a global platform of payment methods and world-class fraud prevention service on safe, secure, and reliable PCI-compliant payment pages.
Below is a summary of their service
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Paypal is the most widely used online credit card service provider on earth. In addition, they have over 230 million member accounts worldwide. This allows customers to pay from their PayPal account to your PayPal account without using a credit card. PayPal has extremely good features and few negatives from merchant’s point of view. Let’s review the details.
Why we like PayPal
Few Negative Points
WorldPay operate in over 40 countries and is a major global leader in payment processing. They pioneered online payments for small and medium sized businesses and process millions of online payments every day.
Worldpay is active in the development and implementation of anti-fraud systems which have helped protect businesses around the globe.
Below is a summary of their service
Have you used or using any of the above online merchant account providers? We would love to read comments about their service. Please use the comment section below and share your experience with the readers. We really appreciate your comments.
Remember…always keep up to date with merchant account fraud and credit card fraud education! Please see the following to help advise about credit card fraud and merchant account fraud and how you can avoid the issue:
PCI | FBI | FTC | Stop Fraud .gov | HG | USA.gov | DOJ | SS | FFIEC | CSOS
Contact us anytime with your merchant processing questions.