Whether you run a retail store, restaurant, online business or any other businesses accepting credit cards as one of transaction means, choosing the right credit card merchant services is crucial and may affect your bottom line more than you think.

The key in choosing the right credit card processing partner is to compare, compare and compare. You need to have multiple options to allow you choose the most suitable credit card merchant account company.

What you should look for in a merchant account company?

To help you decide the most suitable credit card merchant account company, here are some aspects you should consider in choosing one:

• Fees – How much will they charge you initially – namely set-up fee or application fee – and per transaction basis – namely discount rate, usually about 1.5 to 2 percent?
• Support – How’s the level of support you receive from your credit card merchant customer service? My colleague once experienced a credit card fraud in his retail store, and settling the problem with his credit card merchant was an unpleasant experience.
• Accepted credit cards – Obviously, you would want a merchant account company that can handle transactions from all major credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express; the more, the better.
• Contract – You would want to partner with a credit card merchant account company that requires short-term or, even better, no contract.
• Reputation – How’s the reputation of the merchant account company? Bad rep means bad partner – you would not want to risk your business by partnering with such merchant account company.

Credit card processing for your online and off line business

For those of you who are aggressively expanding your business on both online and off line medium, choosing the right credit card processor is even a more crucial issue to address.

There are plenty of options out there, but choosing one that can handle your online and off line credit card processing is a bit trivial – Most of the cases, a good off line merchant service doesn’t offer a good on line service, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, I highly suggest you to choose the one that can handle both worlds well. Why? Because consolidating your online and off line credit card processing means centralised reporting, thus allowing you to better manage your business’ credit card transaction management.

Ivan Widjaya
On consolidated credit card processing

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