Search My Merchant Account Blog

Search this Blog:

Merchant Account Reviews

Thursday, June 14, 2007

There are scores of websites offering reviews of merchant accounts.  Unfortunately, most of the websites will usually be one-sided, favoring one merchant account provider or an agent.  If you are in the United States, you have hundreds of merchant account providers to choose from, and thousands of agents. 

First, remember you will always hear more negative comments about any company than positive ones.  A perfect example is Paypal.  You will hear a lot of negative stories and comments regarding Paypal.  Some people will even claim Paypal is a scam.  When something does not go our way, we tend to complain about it or find others that have had similar situations.  The Internet has allowed those people to congregate on message boards, newsgroups, etc to share experiences.

You can try your best to look at different websites and get a people's opinions.  Unfortunately, that is all it is - an opinion.  The more times you use a service, your chances increase that something will go wrong.  Reviewing a product or service can be very difficult.  Sometimes the reviewer has a bias already toward the company.  Or maybe the reviewer gets other people's opinions of a certain service since there is not any way the reviewer can test that product effectively.  And usually this is the case. 

Each merchant is different.  The reviews that you will read will also just use a certain amount of those services.  And it cannot really compare to your needs.

So what does matter in these reviews?  You can consider these opinions but most people will not give positive comments for a company. What about your money?  With the larger companies (First Data, Nova, Chase-Paymentech), you know your money is safe.  You have a large corporation to back it up.  Most agents will resell for one of these companies (and we have already discussed on how to choose a United States merchant account provider).  Most should be able to give you a free rate review if you have established processing history.   This review is the important factor.  It will allow you to see if you could save money by changing merchant account providers.  And you might be able to keep the same electronic payment gateway so your website will not need to be re-programmed.

Bottom line: Don't let the merchant account review websites fool you.  They are ran by an agent or an ISO.  Even this blog is ran by the people from First Data Loud and you will see information on here from time to time that is beneficial to us.

Comments

Greg said...

>href="https://www.21merchant.com">https://www.21merchant.com