Taking credit card orders is massively important to any business that wants to actively sell their own products on the web. Back in the early days of the Internet it was accepted that accepting plastic was not a good idea, because it was forcing a real world system to the Internet. New companies tried to offer online payment currencies for example “flooz”, but the web-based currencies didn’t flourish. The truth is, roughly a decade on from the people starting to sell on the web, still typing in credit card numbers to buy online and so accepting credit cards when offering goods online is still as important as ever.

There are basically two ways to accept credit cards online. Let’s compare merchant accounts. A business can either go for a full merchant account, which allows the business to process credit cards directly, or they can sign up with a third party payment service, who processed the credit card charges on behalf of the company. Obtaining a full merchant account costs more initially, but has lower per item fees. Using the services of a third party service provider costs less upfront, but has more expensive per item fees.

Making the decision as to whether or not to get a full merchant account or use a third party payment service is just a question of doing the math. Let’s look at two different business types and compare merchant account benefits…

In the main, merchants who are already trading locally and simply want to start selling on the Internet will be more suited to obtaining a merchant account. Most likely, It’s most likely that they will already have a real world credit card processing account and will expand the remit of that account to also do “MOTO”, which is “Mail Order Telephone Order” processing and only means that the credit card holder isn’t there at the time of purchase.

For one-person businesses starting to sell products online, it is strongly suggested that they begin by testing their marketing using a third party processor. The advantage is that there’s hardly any initial cost which means they can test their business model cheaply and easily. If sales boom, they can think about decrease the per-item fees by getting their own merchant card processing account. If the market isn’t profitable, they can quickly leave the market without having expended much capital to get a merchant account.

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