How to Reduce Your Merchant Account Fees

Nov 24, 2012 by admin

If you have your own business, you most likely know by now that when you open a merchant account to accept credit and debit cards at your place of business, there are several fees associated with this. The good news is that there are ways in which you can reduce these fees to save you money.

The best way to reduce your merchant account fees is to compare services and rates of several merchant providers. You don’t want to sign up with the first account you come across. You may find out that a company will get you to sign with them at a lower rate but this turns out to be a trial rate and in six months, your rate goes up to the regular pricing. Be sure that each provider discloses what your rates will be and if you will save any money.

You can lessen the minimum amount that you pay for processing fees if you are not processing a large volume of sales each month. As a general rule, if you have over $1,400 a month in transactions, the minimum processing fee heads to zero.

You want to avoid any monthly service plans at all costs. There are a good majority of processors that will try and push these monthly fees on your, especially the higher rated plans such as the Platinum plan. The fact is that these plans do not save the merchant any money. These plans are supposed to include things such as paper for the credit card terminals. What many merchants aren’t aware of is that paper is very inexpensive to being with,

By following these simple tips, you can save your business money when having a merchant account.

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How to Reassure Your Customer Their Payment is Secure

Nov 4, 2012 by admin

In this day and age with everything going digital, customer are very much concerned about fraud, more specifically credit card fraud. If you are a merchant with a merchant account that allows you to take credit or debit card payments, you will have customers that are concerned about their privacy.

You, as a merchant, will need to let your customers know that their credit card information is safe and secure. You can offer them a credit card security tutorial. This can be done though email where you send them information on how to protect their privacy and tips of fraud prevention. Also let them know when you have taken steps with your merchant account to implement fraud protection features.

Another way you can help protect credit card data is to work directly with the credit card companies. Most major carriers such as MasterCard and Visa will offer measures to assist with fraud prevention. For instance, Visa tells merchants to give their customers receipts which have just the last four numbers of the card on it and have the machine produce codes to hide the rest of the data. This way if the customer loses their receipt, whoever picks it up will not see the whole card number.

Getting your customers inside your store to look around and purchase items is the easy part. However, assuring them that their credit card information is safe and secure is a whole other ballgame. You will need to convince your customers that when you process their credit card, their information is safe. Once you have their trust on that issue, they will no doubt be repeat customers.

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