Being high risk payment processing experts, we strive to help our merchants process credit cards at minimum cost and with minimum interruptions. One way to achieve seamless credit card processing is by opening more than one merchant account. Sure, this may sound like it costs more, but it could save you money in the long run. Here are our top six benefits of using multiple merchant accounts.
1. Save Money on Excessive Surcharge Fees
There are two basic types of merchant accounts: card-present and card-not-present. If you’re processing card-not-present transactions through your card-present merchant account, you’ll end up paying excessive surcharge fees. It may not be a big deal if you’re using it this way minimally. But if you process several card-present and card-not-present transactions, multiple merchant accounts can save you money by using the correct type of account.
2. More Payment Processing Options
Let’s say that your acquiring bank only processes Visa transactions in US dollars, euros, and yen. Although you want to accept Visa credit cards in those three currencies, you also want to accept MasterCard transactions in Australian dollars and Indian rupees, but your bank cannot support that. You can receive more payment processing options for your e-commerce business when you have multiple merchant accounts, making a huge difference on your income.
3. Process for Multiple Websites
You own multiple websites and you operate them all under the same business name. Can you use just one merchant account? Maybe, but the chances are slim. Payment processors and acquiring banks only like to distribute one merchant account per URL because of the risk factor—the more websites per merchant account, the more chargebacks to that account it may receive. However, with more than one merchant account, you will have the opportunity to process credit cards for all of your websites.
4. Avoid Profit Losses
By using multiple merchant accounts, you can avoid profit losses if your payment processor or acquiring bank experiences downtime. Additionally, Visa and MasterCard’s rules and regulations are constantly changing, which means so are the rules and regulations of acquiring banks. Using multiple merchant accounts will allow you avoid profit losses if an acquiring bank terminates one of your accounts.
5. Disperse Your Monthly Sales Volume
When banks evaluate your business to determine your risk factor, they look at your monthly sales volume. Banks consider anything more than $100,000 per month as high risk. With multiple accounts, you can spread out your monthly sales volume and lower your risk factor.
6. Reduce Chargeback Ratio
If you work in an e-commerce industry with potentially high chargebacks—like travel, MOTO, call centers, and subscription-based services–multiple merchant accounts may be a great solution. Similar to dispersing your monthly sales volume, you can disperse your chargebacks too. Instead of having 75 chargebacks to one merchant account, they can spread out among your multiple accounts (unless, as luck would have it, all of your chargebacks are associated with just one account).
For more information on how you can apply for multiple merchant accounts with us, call us toll-free at 1-800-318-2713 or contact us online today.
