If you’re running a business online or even a brick and mortar business you may have wondered How Can I Accept Credit Cards on My Site?

There are several possible. The easiest is usually to set up PayPal payment, but not everybody has a PayPal account or wants to use a Pay Pal account – and some people distrust sites that only use PayPal. Plus, you’ll never know how many potential customers you have lost by not having the ability to receive credit card payments – until you start accepting credit card payments and watch your sales spike. So just how do you accept credit cards on a website?

There are a few parts to being able to accept credit card payments:

  • If you want an online shopping cart, you’ll have to get the software to install one. Then, to accept payments securely, you’ll have to have an account with an internet payment gateway that will encrypt the information and send it to a payment processor. The payment processor will interact with the processing bank by giving the bank the transaction information and returning with the authorization.
  • You might just assume that the bank where you have your merchant account would take care of some of these other steps, but they don’t. Some gateway account providers offer merchant services as well, but if you’re in a high-risk industry such as if you are a psychic, for example – then finding a mainstream processing bank that will touch your business can be tricky.
  • The really key part of setting up a site with the ability to receive credit card payments is finding a merchant services account provider. Merchant accounts are simply bank accounts with the ability to accept credit card payments. However, setting up a merchant account is trickier than it sounds. It’s not like setting up a savings account where virtually no would-be account holder is rejected. When trying to set up a merchant account, you can be rejected for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with you or your company’s credit history or legitimacy or lack of customer complaints.

The most common reason that people have trouble being able to accept credit cards on a website is that the bank deems their business “high risk.” What makes a business high risk? Well, if a bank or merchant account provider determines that you are in an industry where businesses have a high rate of bankruptcy or an unusually large number of chargebacks or fraud, they probably won’t want to give you an account. Even if your business is upstanding, if you’re in an industry known to have a lot of fraudsters – like if you’re a telemarketing company – then a lot of merchant account providers will probably reject you because they will simply assume that you’re likely to go bankrupt or get lots of chargebacks from unhappy customers. If you’re located offshore, merchant account providers may consider you high risk because a lot of shady businesses settle in legally lax offshore locales. If you have a business that has high volume and high ticket transactions, then you are usually considered high-risk because you may be considered less likely to notice fraudulent transaction amongst the high total transaction volume.

So what can you do if you are in a high risk industry? Not to worry, there are merchant services consultants like Rapid Financial Solutions, which specialize in matching your high risk business with the best processor who will accept high risk industries.

As an added service when you become our client, we keep on top of your transactions and any chargebacks or other warnings the bank may have. We e-mail you so these issues are addressed immediately and you don’t risk losing your account.

We are unique in that most other merchant services agents don’t offer this free service.