Seeking Merchant Account

As long as you are happy with your plan then that's all that matters.

I thought I had finally found a home with my last provider: Certified Merchant Services located in Texas. Turns out that I was getting charged all kinds of hidden fees, and the VeriSign PayFlow Link fees made matters much, much worse. After 6 months, I realized that I was in fact funneling all my profits to Certified Merchant Services in fees! Outrageous! An extraordinarily aggravating experience to say the least.

In the end, Certified Merchant Services was sued by the FTC for their funny business:

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/01/cmsjudgment.htm

I am not saying that your experience will be terrible. I'm just coming from a perspective of real experience with merchant accounts and I can tell you that PayQuake is the best I've found and I'll probably be with them for a long time.

Do us all a favor and let us know how things progress with your provider.

AmCy

 

Is it better to go through a bank for a merchant account and payment gateway and just deal with one company? Or should I go searching around for seperate components?

 

Well most banks (except for a few like Chase who have a partnership with First Data to co-brand merchant account processing) actually outsource the processing.

And some banks actually require three-year contract. This can be good for established businesses but for someone who is just starting out - might be a little scary.

Most MAPs will provide everything to you, but most MAPs also actually outsource the gateway to another company (like Verisign / Authorizenet.com) because operating a gateway is a very difficult job. First Data is one of the few companies that has the gateway and merchant account processing. They are actually used by hundreds of other processors / gateways (like Yahoo / Authorizenet.com) to help verify transactions. First data has scores of smaller companies that they filter everything thru (like Cardservice, Western Union, Telecheck).