Ecommerce Merchant Account Specialist

Getting setup to accept credit cards with a credit card merchant account is a relatively easy process and can be done without much hassle. I’ve put together this brief guide to introduce you to a few components of internet merchant account pricing and a couple of comparisons to Paypal which has a good service as well.

The discount rate on a typical credit card merchant account is about 2.1% to 2.5%. This is what’s called a qualified discount rate. Paypal doesn’t break these down into qualified or non-qualified rates, they just charge a flat rate of about 2.9% or so. The downside to this is that if you’re a merchant accepting transactions mostly from individual consumers, you’re overpaying on about 80% or more of your transactions.

Traditional merchant accounts have two other “buckets” into which they categorize transactions. One of these is called the mid-qualified which are typically the “rewards” cards or other credit cards associated with cash back or frequent flyer miles, etc. The other “bucket” is non-qualified for cards that are either government or corporate credit cards. There are some other reasons transactions may fall into these other pricing categories and that may be how long it takes for the funds to capture after they’re authorized. Most merchants never have to worry about this because the charges are captured in the same transaction in which they were authorized.

Both merchant accounts and Paypal charge a per transaction fee. This is usually about $.20 to $.30 for each transaction. Merchant accounts add on an additional $.05 usually for what’s called an AVS fee. Even with that $.05 for AVS, most merchant account per transactions can get to be as low as $.25 or less.

Your more traditional merchant account has what are called “batch header fees” which is a daily processing fees. Transactions are batched together, usually daily. Each of these batches is assessed a $.25 batch header fee. So if you process batches every day for 30 days, you’d have about $8 or so worth of “batches” that you’d be paying for. This is one small advantage of Paypal merchant services is that they don’t have this batch header fee. This is a fee that you should be able to negotiate with your service provider.

Merchant accounts have monthly fees. Paypal has a monthly fee if you use their merchant services. If you’re just accepting payments from other Paypal customers, you won’t have a monthly fee. But if you use them as you would a traditional merchant account where the payments can come from either Paypal customers or individual cardholders without a Paypal account, you’ll have a $25 monthly fee. Traditional merchant accounts can be as low as $10 to $15 per month including the gateway fee. If you’re an internet business just getting off the ground, try to get your monthly minimum waived. This is usually a $25 minimum and can be pricey especially when you’re just getting started.

Processing transactions through the internet also implies that you’ll have additional fees involved. This is usually through what’s called a gateway which is a company or software that will facilitate getting the transaction information from your customer to the bank for processing and is done online. Authorize.net is probably one of the more popular gateways that you’ve heard of. There are a lot more, but only a handful that are compatible with just about every shopping cart solution out there. If you do decide on Authorize.net, plan on a setup fee of about $100 or so. There are plenty of companies that give this setup away for free, but most of them also charge more on the monthly or will charge you the equivalent in an annual fee.

Getting setup with an internet credit card merchant account isn’t too difficult and should be considered vital to any internet or ecommerce project. This can be done usually about 1-2 weeks before going live which will give you plenty of time to get your account approved (usually 2-3 days at most) and another week or so of testing. You should be able to get this setup without many problems at all.

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