Minimum Monthly Fee

Some solutions might require a minimum monthly fee. For example, if there is a minimum monthly fee of $1000. That means, the amount of your monthly volume * discount rate must be at least $1000. Therefore, if for a certain month, your monthly volume * discount rate is $800, then you would need to pay an extra $200 to make up the $1000 minimum monthly fee. If the amount of your monthly volume * discount rate is more than $1000, then you won't need to pay any extra. The purpose of minimum monthly fee is to encourage that a certain monthly volume must be achieved.

Processing History

Some solutions do not accept new merchants. For example, a solution might require a minimum monthly volume of $100k with 6 months processing history. Usually, this type of solutions would definitely provide a better rate than those which do not require a processing history. If you can't provide any processing history at this moment, don't worry. After a few months, once you build up some history, we can always get you a better solution. When you submit your processing history, please prepare screenshots of your online processing history showing your existing provider name. An excel file showing some numbers does not count.

Interface

If you are applying for your own merchant account, our acquiring bank will put you in contact with their payment gateway. There might be several official payment gateways for you to select. Based on different packages and service fees, you choose the one that works for you best. Payment gateway will provide technical manual, testing account for your website. Sometimes, the payment integration part could be a bit tricky, and you might need to hire a programmer to do the integration for you. In most cases, your merchant account will come with a virtual terminal. A virtual terminal is just like an online payment form that allows you to process your transactions manually. But of course, most probably you would want your transaction flow to be fully automatic.

One of the advantages for getting your own merchant account is that you can keep the whole transaction procedure within your website, i.e. your online customers do not need to jump to another website to fill in forms, complete transaction, etc. You can setup a database to store your customers' data. Next time when your customers shop again, your shopping-cart simply pulls up the relevant data from your database. On the other hand, if you are using a 3rd party billing solution, you won't have the luxury of storing those customers' data.

Chargeback

When a credit card user could you recognize a certain transaction on his/her credit card statement, he/she would most possibly call up that merchant and asks for a refund. However, from time to time, due to different reasons, those merchants might refuse to do a refund or simply ignore the issue. In that case, the credit card user could file a complaint with his/her card issuing bank. Then the merchant's acquiring bank will do a chargeback on the merchant. If the number of chargeback increases, the acquirer will raise the chargeback fee and also impose a penalty fee on the merchant. If chargeback becomes excessive, the acquirer will close the merchant's account for good. Once it is closed, that merchant will be black-listed, and it would be quite difficult to apply for a new merchant account anywhere.

Some merchant asked if there is any merchant solution with a non chargeback option and any payment gateway that will do due diligence on each transaction, we don't think that's possible. That is always the merchant's responsibility to take care of chargeback. If you can get a low chargeback rate, you could get a better discount rate.