One of the easiest and most instant ways to increase net revenues is by reducing costs. This is especially true when a cost of doing business is associated with each and every transaction that is made as a merchant. Depending on the bill of sale, a transaction fee can be as high as 20% of the total sale (due to minimum “per transaction” fees) with some merchant accounts just to approve and process a credit card. Some payment gateway vendors provide a flat rate per transaction. While a flat rate service is acceptable for a low volume storefront, a merchant will miss out on some heavy bulk discounts when as the amount of transactions increase each month. Finding a solid merchant account can actually help your business earn more by costing less per transaction as your business grows!
Obtaining a merchant account to process customer credit cards does not need to be a cumbersome process. Web merchants are particularly susceptible to high transaction fees because many web hosts and shopping cart software vendors bundle pre-installed merchant accounts into their services. They get away with it because they are a little too convenient. By giving you instant access to a merchant account, or a quick payment gateway, they can hide the actual per-transaction-pricing in the grey areas of client contracts. Websites may be using a service like Paypal, Worldpay, Google Checkout, and others because they were a nice self-service bundle that came with a hosting or software package. What isn’t made too clear is that webmasters can save literally thousands per month by switching to a true payment service provider. The pricing schemes allow for very low transaction fees, especially as the business grows and more transactions are completed each month.
While common payment providers such as Worldpay and Paypal are getting better at anti-fraud and anti-identity-theft policies and detection technologies, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Whereas a credit card payment companies offer very defensive security practices and technologies and vast anti-fraud payment solutions to protect customer credit card transactions online.
Axiar also offers solutions for offline payment processing as well. Traditional businesses that also offer online products and shopping can benefit by having the same company handle their online and offline processing needs.
While using a “bundled” service might be tempting and sound easy at first, it is recommended to invest early in a true payment processor. As a business grows, a payment processor can grow with it and offer continuous customer service and bulk transaction discounts.