Merchant account has been a necessity for the retailers in order to accept credit cards from their customers online on their websites. Usually you must go to your bank, they evaluate your risks and only then after thorough checks you are allowed to open a merchant account. Opening a merchant account takes a lot of time lots of paperwork is needed, your credit score should be checked, your websites are checked thoroughly. The acquiring bank can easily decline your application if your product seems a bit risky to them. Such things happen especially when you try to sell your digital products online ebooks or software. So it can be a quite hard to start processing credit cards online. But today, it is not the only option for the business which is just on the start up move. There are a number of services which does not require merchant account for accepting credit cards. All you have to do is just to signup on one of these companies, add your product details to the system and place payment buttons on your website. They will resell your product your customers will be able to buy your product with credit cards or Paypal payments and you will get your earnings paid out directly to your bank account or Paypal.
In order to accept credit cards online without a merchant account you have to:
1.Search for the existing credit card processors online that would process payments for you. You have to find whether you need a processor to accept cards both in online and offline mode. Then you need to locate whether the processor allows your special product type to be accepted.
2.Then you must initiate an investigation for the third party payment processors which are available. Some of third party payment processors have comparatively higher transactions fees than others, but on the other hand they provide very responsive services and makes immediate bank account transfers. So make sure you get all information beforehand processing rates, refund and chargeback fees, a list of accepted product types.
3.When you find a right company, just signup on it and provide some personal details. All of them require your personal details, bank account information, contact details and an email address.
4.In some cases you will also need to provide the social security number for applying through the third party processors, depending on the sales turnover and account needs.
5.The next important stage is incorporating the service into the website. This requires a bit of web development consultations to create some attractive payment buttons for the customers to complete their purchase. Usually once your account is approved, you have to submit products that you are planning to sell for an approval. The processor usually checks your website and products sales pages whether you provide enough information about the product, they compare if your website complies to all regulatory rules and then approves your product. Once you get your product approved, you are provided a simple html code to place on your website to direct visitors to your products checkout page to order the product. All you have to do is just to place those payment buttons on your website and you will be ready to go.
Once you have everything set up, all you have to do is just to start advertising your website online to get visitors Potential customers will read your website and find all payment buttons you provide. They will be redirected to your products checkout pages and be able to buy using their credit cards or Paypal account.
This way you dont need to open a separate merchant account to sell products online. One more good thing for using 3rd party payment processors is that you dont have to deal with possible credit card fraud. Such companies will check all your transactions for you, so you can be sure that you will sell your products successfully without any potential risks to your account getting closed.
