Are you looking for High Risk Merchant Account Rates for your High Risk Business?
Are you wondering why they can’t be given to you before you start the process?
Banks mail out credit card offers with rate offerings on a daily basis – but if you’re looking at getting a merchant account, you’ll find that getting high risk merchant account rates before you’ve even started the process isn’t quite as easy.
If you’re new to business and aren’t quite sure what a high risk merchant account even is, it’s pretty simple. Merchant accounts are the types of accounts necessary for accepting credit card payments for your customers. PayPal is great, but it isn’t a real merchant account, it’s actually called a wallet.
If you really want to look like a legit business, eventually you’ll want to be able to accept credit cards for your online business. Some well-established businesses in certain industries can get a merchant account any old place – but those operating in high risk industries will likely need to find specialists, agents who know how to get merchant accounts for almost anyone.
If you find the right agent, getting a merchant account can almost always be done even if you’re in a high risk industry like adult entertainment or video games online sales. However, in order to find out what the exact rates will be for your account, you’ll need to fork over a lot of information. That’s not because underwriters are trying to be difficult; it’s because they have risk analysis standards they use to calculate rates, so in order to give you rates, they need all the relevant information to evaluate your creditworthiness and risk level.
With every company and every business owner, the specifics are different, but some of the things underwriters will definitely take into consideration are credit history and savings. Essentially, a merchant account is like a loan because the underwriter is agreeing to stand behind your business in the event of a chargeback or multiple chargebacks. That’s why underwriters want the necessary information to figure out if chargebacks are likely and, if they are, whether you have the good credit and reputation to deal with them.
In order to figure out how likely it is that chargebacks will occur, underwriters will want to know specifics about how you run your business. Thus, they’ll need to learn about your terms and conditions, privacy policy, and refund policy before they can give you a high risk merchant account quote. They will definitely want to check out your website, in part because that’s the place where business policies might often be displayed. That means that it’s important that you have a website that functions properly, has proper contact information, makes it easy to see what a person is buying and what they click on to buy. Plus, it also helps if the site looks nice. If your site looks like it was thrown together by your 10-year-old, underwriters might think twice when agreeing to stand behind your business.
A badly designed site makes it appear that a business owner doesn’t actually know how to run a business and might be at a higher risk for fraud, incompetence, and chargebacks. It can still be possible to get a high risk merchant account in those circumstances, but it is likely that the rates will be higher.
Again, that’s not to say that starting a merchant account can’t be done if you have one or more flags for being a high risk client – it just means that you need to find the right agent to help you, and you need to provide the right information to get the most accurate and most favorable rate quote.
Being an efficient accommodating business owner who makes changes to the website and gets us the proper paperwork quickly goes a long way in Rapid Financial Solutions helping you get your merchant account so your business can get to the next level.
