When you are looking for the right merchant account providers, you should look for the service from which the processor will be providing instead of the rates. You should ask the other merchants with businesses similar to your own for suggestions. You need to ensure that there will be an available help desk during the hours that your business is open in case you need any help. how to become a credit card processor The good merchant account providers will offer high customer service level. You need to select a processor with a good reputation. You don’t have to select the best known provider; there are service providers that are smaller, yet offer you the best services. Knowing these tips will tremendously help in looking for the right provider.
If you are a business owner, you should be aware that your business cannot complete without a standard credit card processing solution. According to a recent report, the average credit card sale amounts to $40 against the average cash sale of $9. Offering a credit card payment option, not only enables your customers to get an alternative method of payment, but also a method that is less expensive as compared to payment through cash or through checks. Coopers & Lybrand conducted a case study and found that the processing cost for credit card transactions averages 2. 7% as against the transaction cost of 4. 8% and 4. 0% for cash and checks respectively. These figures can very well make a business owner excited to establish a merchant credit card processing account in doing so, increase their volume of sales.
Some business owners might have doubts whether or not to consider accepting credit cards. Here are a few solid reasons for considering accepting credit cards When payments are received from customers through credit cards, there will be reduction of paper work and there is also no need for depositing through checks to banks.
The only question that a business owner who is considering setting up credit card processing needs to consider carefully, is how to find the right Merchant Credit card processing company. Finding the right merchant services provider is essential since different types of accounts are provided by the processor of credit card transactions it’s important to find a processor that has a complete product line of Payment Solutions.
A payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information between a payment portal (such as a website, mobile phone or IVR service) and the Front End Processor or acquiring bank. When a customer orders a product from a payment gateway-enabled merchant, the payment gateway performs a variety of tasks to process the transaction: A customer places order on website by pressing the ‘Submit Order’ or equivalent button, or perhaps enters their card details using an automatic phone answering service.
If the order is via a website, the customer’s web browser encrypts the information to be sent between the browser and the merchant’s webserver. This is done via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. The merchant then forwards the transaction details to their payment gateway. This is another SSL encrypted connection to the payment server hosted by the payment gateway.
The credit card issuing bank receives the authorization request and sends a response back to the processor (via the same process as the request for authorization) with a response code. In addition to determining the fate of the payment, (i. e. approved or declined) the response code is used to define the reason why the transaction failed (such as insufficient funds, or bank link not available) The payment gateway receives the response, and forwards it on to the website (or whatever interface was used to process the payment) where it is interpreted as a relevant response then relayed back to the cardholder and the merchant.
The acquiring bank deposits the total of the approved funds in to the merchant’s nominated account. This could be an account with the acquiring bank if the merchant does their banking with the same bank, or an account with another bank. Many payment gateways also provide tools to automatically screen orders for fraud and calculate tax in real time prior to the authorization request being sent to the processor. Tools to detect fraud include geolocation, velocity pattern analysis, delivery address verification, computer finger printing technology, identity morphing detection, and basic AVS checks.