merchant account

[Gomvents]

I have great credit - can anyone recomend a good merchant account that will eventually allow me to do face-to-face swiped transactions as we plan to open a physical store in the near future? Thanks! (currently 100% of our business will be via the web or over the phone)

[jwolthuis]

I'd talk to your banker. He might be able to give you a good rate, and establish a general line of credit for your business too.

It's always good to have a personal relationship with your bank and your lawyer :-)

[Wlauzon]

Your business bank is probably the best place. I have yet to find any the more popular places that are big online even come close to the rates we get - in fact we pay about 35% of what the paypal percentage is, but we do a decent volume also.

[Gomvents]

Wlauzon, which bank are you using? We use Bank of America

[shri]

Face to Face -- with signed credit card slips should be dead easy with your existing bank. Talk to the branch manager at your local branch.

[grobe]

Who is optimal really depends on how big your volume is.

Besides your bank look at the wholesale clubs (Sam's and Costco) plus your local retail federation (for me that is the Iowa Retail Federation).

Paypal with its Website Pro also includes the virtual terminal (so you can do face to face). Propay is a possibility for low volumes in the US.

[analogy]

I'd use a payment processing company. I use a great one in the UK, but I guess that doesn't help you!

[Wlauzon]

Wlauzon, which bank are you using? We use Bank of America

We also use BOA for our merchant banking.

We do a fairly high volume, but not anywhere near the top end that a place like BestBuy might do, but we still pay under 1.4%. PayPal was wanting around 2.8% last time I checked, and some other online processors were as high as 4%.

However - and this is an important difference - we do all of our CC manually or with card swipes. The reason is because we have a lot of large and/or heavy items, and UPS *never* figures the shipping correctly, so if we did it fully automated online we would have to make far too many corrections and re-submissions.

Rates are different for online and card swipes also by a small amount.

[bcc1234]

Talk to someone at Wells Fargo.
This is the a bank that never gave me crap about sales volume. Even if you go over the limit you originally declared they will still process it without any problems.