Setting your business up to accept credit cards is a great way to reach out to new customers and encourage your existing customers to spend more. Nowadays, most businesses that process credit/debit cards do so via a merchant account. Merchant accounts essentially serve as a credit/debit card processing agreement between a business, a merchant bank and/or a third-party processor.
The following are a couple of tips that both current and prospective merchant account users can benefit from:
Buy Non-Proprietary Hardware
Credit card payments are processed via a POS terminal when customer credit cards are either swiped or manually keyed-in. With so many POS terminals available on the market, it is often times hard to choose between them. When looking at terminal you want to weigh it’s accessibility, flexibility, operating speed, cost, functionality and reliability. You’ll also want to consider whether or not a terminal is non-propriety. Non-Proprietary essentially means that the terminal’s hardware and software are independent of each and thus can be bought separately. Non-Proprietary terminals can pretty much be reprogrammed by any processor, making them a much more open and accommodating option than the alternative- a proprietary system. With a proprietary POS, terminal hardware and software are packaged together, sold, and supported all by the same company. This makes them very vendor specific and severely limits the options that are available to the user. In my opinion you should never buy proprietary hardware or hardware that you can’t take with you to another processor. Read the rest of this entry »
