Merchant Account or Reseller Account?

by Bob Haslam

 

     Selling any kind of service or product requires a merchant account or third party payment processor. How you plan on conducting your business will determine what kind of merchant account you actually need. If you plan on selling offline as well as online, you will probably need a full merchant account with a credit card terminal and processing software. This is far more expensive to set up than a third party reseller account for doing business strictly online, but you will get a lower processing fee. Full featured merchant accounts can be as high as $1500 per year with a recurring monthly fee of $25-$100 per month. It will also take much longer to setup than an online third party account would take. Online merchant account setup times range from instant to about a day or two. If all of your business is conducted online, you do not need a full merchant account anymore.

 

     Most online merchant account providers or resellers want to review your product and/or web site before they will allow you to list it. The overwhelming majority of merchant account providers give you a virtual terminal and charge a monthly fee in addition to processing fees. Some even have monthly sales minimums and charge a penalty if you don't make the required minimum. A few companies make you take the order on your site and then go to their website to fill in the order information! That just creates more work for you as a webmaster. You’ve already got a job as a webmaster/marketer. You don’t need another one as a 24/7 terminal master or data entry clerk. I personally prefer a reseller account that handles all of the credit card transactions seamlessly and just sends me my money. I don’t mind paying a slightly higher rate for that added convenience.

 

     You have great security and the added benefit of not having to purchase expensive card terminal equipment and gateway software or pay any monthly fees with the resellers listed below:

 

· 2 Checkout Reseller Account A high security merchant reseller with fast account setup. They also have a fee structure that puts more money back in your pocket than most other third party merchant resellers. They handle regular merchandise as well as digital products. They are definitely worth looking at. The best feature of this service is that you can set it up for direct deposit and not even have to worry about cashing a check—and they pay weekly. They have a reasonable one-time setup fee per web site. No monthly statement or terminal fees are charged.

 

· Click Bank Reseller Account They have top-notch security and are one of the most well known third party merchant account providers on the web. You will need a separate thank you page for each product that you sell which makes selling multiple products a pain to set up initially. Multiple products can be listed on the same sales page. They only allow you to list digital products that can be downloaded or delivered by email and pay or subscription sites. They have a reasonable one-time setup fee and payouts are bi-weekly.

 

·PayPal Reseller Account Great security updates now make this third party reseller another option. There are no fees involved to use them. Their signup and verification process is more complicated and time consuming than the above two companies, but the transaction fees are a little lower. They allow digital products as well as regular merchandise. A major advantage is the fact that signing up for a PayPal account is free.

 

     There are more choices, but I chose not to list the ones that had what I felt were excessively high rates, unreasonable personal information disclosure, or difficult setup procedures. The three that are listed above will securely serve almost any web business that you might choose. I use them for my own web sites and get paid on time every time. The above resellers will not service adult, gambling, or online pharmacies.

 

· Link Security is an issue with any online payment links. Some unscrupulous webmasters run scripts that can change link information enabling them to get credit for your sale. Make sure that you encrypt your link to any merchant, affiliate, or reseller account. My first six months selling online were a complete disaster. I did not make one red cent. None of my links were encrypted. The payment link at the credit card processor was not encrypted either. Potential customers went straight to the payment processor, looked at the source code on the payment page, and went straight to the download page on my site to pick up their free download at my expense. That rookie webmaster mistake cost me thousands. I changed processing companies, and used a "secret weapon" to encrypt my links. My first online sale came a little less than an hour later. Now, my sales receipts and my download logs actually match--month after month! It's a tremendous sense of relief to know that I'm not getting ripped off anymore.

Changing online payment processors to all of the above (yes, I do use all of them) and using my "secret weapon" has saved my online life--literally and physically. You do not have a real business if you are not making real money. If you've stayed with me through my embarrassingly true story, then you deserve to know what my "secret weapon" is--Affiliate Cloner. These days very few products live up to their hype. Affiliate Cloner will protect your links plain and simple. It only does that one job, but it does it very well. And the best part is: you won't have to mortgage your house to get it. It's a little less than $50.