SETUP TIMELINE FOR OFFSHORE MERCHANT ACCOUNTS

If you have decided that your business should have a merchant account then, you are doing the right thing. The application and then, setting up of the merchant account is a straightforward and simple process. A Merchant Account is needed for your business to accept credit card payments from your customers. The opening of the merchant account starts when you request a proposal for pricing. The pricing will depend on several factors such as type of service or product, average sales ticket, processing volume and the method of accepting the payments, among others. Conventionally, the online and direct marketing processing services will cost you more than the face to face solutions. Before, buying the account you should take price proposals from several processors and compare them to see who is providing the best deal. The companies should not take more than a day to reply to the request.

After making your choice of the account provider, after doing proper research, you have to fill the application form and give it to the company. You should also provide any documents that are required by the processor to process your application. Some of the documents which are given include business license, tax returns for past 2 years and cancelled check of the account that should be linked to the merchant account, among others. After you submit all these documents to your service provider, the provider should be able to process it and set up your service within 2 days. When you are opening an online merchant account, an extra day is needed for setting up the “Payment Gateway”.

The entire process which includes; deciding your provider, fill and submit the application and finally, the set up of your service shouldn’t take over 7 days. The answer to a speedy process is to provide all the information and documents on time and also clearly telling your processing company what is needed by you. To do that, you should be sure what you need which requires some amount of research before beginning the acquiring process.

If your line of business is like a retail business then the face to face processing of credit cards should serve your purpose and you should look no further. However, if you are involved in e – commerce then you have to get the e – commerce merchant account or the online merchant account. Well when you need both types of processing, then also you require only one account.

If your business already has a merchant account, then simply call your processor and tell him the service required by you. The only major difference between the two types of accounts is the method in which the cards are received. For physical retail stores you need terminal equipment that reads the details from the magnetic strip of the card and for the web based solutions the user has to enter the credit card details. In this case, your processor only has to add another service to your active merchant account.

Contact one of our helpful account representatives to assist you in the setup of a high risk merchant account or offshore merchant account for a high risk merchant.