When you are a businessman who needs a credit card payment from your customers, you need to set up a merchant account. The merchant account provider will be responsible in processing the payment transactions through credit cards. They will offer you solutions such as rates, terms, services, features and incentives that is necessary for your business in dealing with your customers. As you start looking for the best merchant account, you need to know the classifications of merchant accounts. And as you understand the available elements featured in each company you gain the ability to choose the one which is suitable to solve your business needs.
The two classifications of merchant account are the card-present merchant accounts and the not-present merchant account. There are fees and rates that apply to a specific merchant account. A high rate and fees is charged to merchants that usually has high risk throughout their credit card payment transactions. Thus, there will be lesser risk in credit card-present merchant accounts than the not-present merchant account.
The credit card-present merchant accounts
It has requirements and qualifications that need customer and his credit card to be present during the payment transactions. The card is swiped to a magnetic strip reader and it captures the information and data electronically. The businessman, on the other hand needs to invest in a hardware that captures the data electronically.
The card-present merchant accounts are categorized into non portable processing solution and portable processing solution. The non portable processing is usually preferred by many retailers as it is quickly installed in phones and modems. It gives an easy transaction such as a quick swiped of credit cards into hardware to record data of the said transactions. Another advantage of non portable processing is the low cost compared to portable processing. On the other hand, the portable processing has the ability to authorize in time and sometimes may not authorize on time. In the case of wireless merchant account with magnetic card reader, you can set authorization in time but will have higher rates and fees.
The credit card-not-present merchant accounts
The credit card-not-present merchant accounts. It is the cheapest merchant account compared to other credit cards. It is also known as the telephone merchant account and the fastest, convenient to use as it only requires a telephone or mobile phone. As a businessman, you can accept credit card payments that need no portability or hardware when doing the transactions. Every business can be unique and needs a merchant account to deliver fine transactions. It can open up your opportunity to an increasing profitable business performance.