Multiple Sites, 1 Merchant Account

Is it against Visa/MC policy?

[pdivi]

I am setting up a merchant account with a bank and an Auth.net gateway. My plan was to hook the payment processing for a few different sites into the same merchant account. My bank now tells me that Visa & MC have a policy that for each site you need a unique vendor ID, and hence, a unique merchant account. Sounds odd to me. Anyone know if it's true?

[rexrhino]

From my experiences, it matters if you are presenting the sites as seperate buisnesses or not.

For example, if you have two electronic gadget stores, that appear to be two seperate competing websites, then it wouldn't be OK to use the same merchant account.

However, if you ran a media company, and sold CDs and DVDs on one site, and video games on another website, but made it clear it was the same company and same name, shouldn't be a problem. I have done something similiar to this in the past, and have had no trouble with the merchant provider.

I believe that the credit card companies don't want a bunch of buisnesses getting together and sharing one merchant account, and the rules are geared for that. And they don't want a company to cheat customers under one name, then open up shop under a different name in order to avoid the bad reputation. But the merchant companies will be quite reasonable provided what you are doing is honest.