The following are basic tips on looking for reliable merchant account services:

- Examine Fees Charged: There are many different vendors out there and as a result there are diverse fees assessed to transactions. If you utilise merchant services you’ll be charged: A monthly fee, a discount rate which is essentially a percentage of the cost of the product sold and a transaction fee. There are also other fees applied by some providers so you should watch out for that.

– Receiving payments online is not as simple as you might think and when a customer purchases something online there are three steps the cash goes through before it actually gets to your bank-account. These include a payment gateway, Internet credit card processing a/c, and your website.

– The billing process will be completed on and integrated with your site where the client will finish the order processing. Then he will be able to sign out or print confirmation numbers that the order was placed successfully. While there seems to be a lot involved in processing a simple online order it actually occurs rapidly and most customers never know their information is traveling to so many places.

– Internet cc processing accounts: If you have a cc processing account you can take credit-card from anyone in any country, but if you are taking them over the phone or the internet you must be authorised for ‘card not present’ transactions. If you are taking credit card details over the internet, specify that you want an _internet_ credit card processing a/c. This is important. ‘Card not present’ transactions attract more fraud; if you do them with an ordinary credit-card processing account you risk losing it.

– If you want to sell on the internet, you need to accept credit-cards. To accept credit cards, you need a credit-card processing account, or access to one. There’re two ways of getting this: Get your own merchant a/c, or ‘pimp’ off somebody else’s.

– Third-party factoring sites have to be very strict; they are answerable to their own credit-card processing account provider. Too many bogus orders and they go out of business. This is why third-party factoring services like 2Checkout are very useful to a newbie merchant: fraud prevention. They can screen out dodgy orders.

– Most vendors would like to think they can sell internationally. The reality is most of the world is poor; MOST countries don’t have the cash to buy your items. So some citizens try to get them illegally. A smart merchant would bar most of the world from accessing his cart and only accept orders from the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and his home country. Harsh, but you’ll sleep better at night.

I hope these few beginner suggestions will help you in researching reliable merchant account services.

About the author: N. Svengali is an author for merchant account and buildings insurance websites in London in the UK.