Cheap Merchant Account

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By jasonstevens

For many retailers and merchants, the credit card processing fees are a substantial cost to their business.  A cheap merchant account can be a great way to make sure that you are paying as little as possible to process your customer's credit cards and debit cards.  You can search online to find a cheap merchant account which is offered by a large number of companies these days.

It can be a little bit different to compare one cheap merchant account to another.  In general, there are three numbers that you want to compare.  The first is the cost per month: many merchant accounts have a cost per month that may depend on your number of transactions or the type of credit card terminal you use.  You also want to compare the flat fee and percentage fee of credit card and debit card transactions.  Only by comparing all of these numbers can you determine which is the cheapest merchant account.

Merchant account providers have all sorts of tricks that may confuse you into believing that their merchant account is cheaper than it really is.  Watch out for temporary rates: Be sure to get the final permanent rate and use that for your comparison unless you are sure that you will remember to shop around for a better deal when the introductory credit card processing rate expires.  Some accounts will have a low monthly fee or even be free, but then require that you pay a very high rate per transaction.  Others will tease you with a low transaction fee, but gouge you with a high subscription fee every single month.  The ideal cheap merchant account will have a low fixed subscription fees and a reasonable transaction feel.

It can be time-consuming and confusing to do the calculations yourself to determine which merchant account is least expensive.  If you wish, you can search online and many websites will try to provide an objective apples-to-apples comparison of merchant accounts in plain English.  This is something that a merchant account sales person will never do because unfortunately their success depends in many cases on being confusing and making sure that you do not get the best deal!  When using one of these calculators, you should be prepared with the number of transactions you do each month and their average value since different types of merchant accounts may be better for different types of businesses.

Even when you find the best cheap merchant account, it's important not to forget them you should always try to get customers to use a debit card instead of a credit card since you will pay lower rates in every case.  Even compared to a debit card, a check or cash is an even better deal since you won't be giving up even 1% of your profits to the credit card company. 

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