If you are a newbie webmaster looking to start your own online business, one of the first things you may start considering is how to earn from it. Being a web-based business, you cannot accept payment in the traditional manner. While a brick-and-mortar operation can run transactions through a POS terminal, you will not have the same luxury. Enter: the merchant account provider

A search on the web of just what a merchant account provider is will result in a dizzying flood of information liberally mixed in with promotional plugs and hard sell. Let’s shave off all the excess info, with these few need-to-know terms that you, as an online merchant, have to have a firm grasp of:

Merchant Account Provider – A merchant account provider is a company or institution that provides payment processing solutions for online business owners, who are known as the merchants.  They process credit card payments of online customers on behalf of the merchants.

Acquirer bank – An acquirer bank is a bank or financial institution that works in conjunction with merchant account providers. The main role of an acquirer bank is to transfer credit card information, along with other particulars of the online purchase, to a credit card company or association, after which the credit card company then forwards the information to an issuing bank.

High Risk Merchant Account – A high risk merchant account is a credit card payment solution that caters to online businesses of the more controversial nature. These online businesses include gambling, travel, pharmacy, and adult content websites.The reason they are primarily classified as high risk is because of a high incidence of back payments, otherwise known as “chargebacks”.

Secure Socket Layer – A secure socket layer, or SSL, is a protocol used to transmit confidential documents through the internet.  This process encrypts sensitive data so that is can be safely transported anywhere online, normally done on confidential information such as credit card numbers, financial info, etc.

Offshore Merchant Account – These are merchant accounts that are taken as an alternative to merchant account providers who cater to high risk accounts.  Being from another country, these merchant account providers are therefore able to offer more competitive rates, owing to the fact that being outside of the United States, they are not subject to the usual requirements and regulations on credit card processing.

Affiliate Program – This is a form of advertising done on the Internet, in which the affiliates are other websites with advertisements that drive traffic onto the advertiser, which is another website, and the advertiser then pays the affiliate for every traffic sent to the advertiser.  Depending on how the affiliate program is structured, often termed as a “tier”, affiliates can earn an increasing amount of income from the traffic they send to the advertiser.

Chargebacks – A chargeback a payment reversal. The consumer may ask for it for several reasons, some situations that call for a chargeback include service dissatisfaction or when a customer doesn’t receive the ordered item.

eCommerce – Any form of business done on the Internet is known as eCommerce. Internet being what it is, that is, virtual in nature, payments must be done through credit card transactions, after which the item purchased is delivered to the purchaser.

A lot of people are venturing into online business. Whether you’re planning to start one or already running your own website, the presence of competition is just about anywhere. So how can you possibly be recognized despite the multitude of websites having the same nature of business such as yours? Answer… improve your website. This article will teach ways on how to make your website very competitive.

Go easy on the large graphics.  It’s true that bigger graphics can look great and amazing at a glance, but they also cause pages to load slower than other pages with smaller graphics in them.  The main reason for the internet is for people to access information faster, so it doesn’t really make sense that they have to wait a long time for your website pages to load.  Tip: lessen their waiting time or experience lessening customers and visitors.

Be interesting.  You can do this by adding online resources to your website.  Not only will visitors keep coming back for the online resource you offer, but your popularity will also grow by word-of-mouth.  The best part about offering something interesting is that people tend to talk about it with other people they know, so more people get to know about your website, and more people will try out your online resource.  Tip: freebies are the way to go, the better your freebie, the better your website looks to visitors.

Prioritize Information. The most important information that you would want your visitor to come across should be placed at the most logical spot. Since people checking websites read from top going down, it’s best to put the essentials at the top. People tend to expect and have their impression of the website on the first thing they see or read. It’s quite advantageous if the important content is located there. Tip: If you are selling products on your website, place the best selling ones at the top or nearest to it.

Remove the eyesores.  Sure, contrasting colors look cool, if you’re into psychedelic, but it’s not really all that functional, especially if you’re the only one that likes the colors your website has.  If you don’t want people to visit or linger on your site, by all means, use the craziest color contrasts you can think of, otherwise, use color schemes that will not give visitors a headache or strain their eyes when they decide to visit your site.  Tip: stick to black text on white background, especially on documents.

Less is more.  A roller on the mouse is big help if browsers need to scroll down your website to see what they need, but that doesn’t mean this is a good thing.  If you have a lot of information or you have a lot to say, try and split the information onto other pages, as people often find clicking easier that scrolling down.  Another thing you could do is try to compress your information so that it fits into one page, don’t say in five sentences what you can say in one.  Tip:  Browsers tend to leave a site if there is too much scrolling to do, so keep it short and sweet.

Navigation, navigation, navigation.  No one likes getting lost, even in websites.  Even the most patient of people will give up on your website when there are a multitude of others which offer easier navigation.  Make sure visitors can get to the section they want to go, and get back to where they started with the least confusion and stress.  Navigating your website shouldn’t be a test of their wits, not if you want them to stay or visit your site again.  Tip: Don’t get too fancy, don’t leave dead ends, and don’t leave broken links in your site.

Choosy Customers. If you are processing transactions on your website, you have to select the most reliable and efficient internet merchant account. There are a lot of payment gateways or internet billing solutions offering almost about the same services as the others, do not limit yourself to just a couple. However, you have to be selective in choosing those that cater to the needs of your business. If you have a lot of visitors from other countries, it would be best to look into international merchant options. Tip: There are some payment gateway providers that offer free helpful resources to improve their customer’s website, might as well check it out and see if indeed it could be of help.

In order to gain full understanding of the terms and processes of eCommerce, one must know the internal workings of online processing. The term eCommerce has been has been widely used by those in the business industry for quite some time now; however, there is still a substantial number of vendors or merchants that do not understand the full scheme of eCommerce.

It starts out with acquiring a merchant account. Unlike offline businesses, online merchants do not have the luxury of having a physical point-of-sale terminal to start processing their sales. What they have instead is a software that enables them to accept purchases and payments. A virtual shopping cart lets the buyers check-in what they intend on buying. The upside to this modern function: it lets the buyer think their purchases through first.

The shopping cart is connected to a payment gateway. In essence, a payment gateway is an interface that facilitates the transactions between the financial networks and your website’s virtual POS. Payment gateways allow real time transactions – including authorization, processing and management. It is one of the factors that allow online merchants to receive credit card payments. Be aware though, that having access to a payment gateway does not mean you would be able to automatically receive payments. The transactions have to be routed through financial institutions.

This is where the merchant account comes in. A merchant account is your key to receiving online payments (such as paperless checks and credit cards). It is a type of bank account granted to merchants by acquiring banks. Merchants have to go through an approval process to obtain said merchant account.

You have to take into consideration that the requirements for applying for a merchant account vary from one bank to another. Those classified as “high-risk” — businesses such as pharmaceuticals, adult, gambling, MOTO, etc — have lower probability or resources in terms of acquiring a merchant account as compared to other business that do not fall under the high-risk category. MasterCard, Visa and other credit card companies have a meticulous criteria for high-risk accounts such as monitoring for chargeback ratio.

While the process may look difficult at first, it is fairly simple and the benefits are far greater than the initial effort that you’d have to exert. Having an e-commerce website automates your processes and makes your site a global affair with the ability to accept payments round-the-clock.

Services like eMerchantPay (http://www.emerchantpay.com) offers services suited for all types of merchants, including those in the restricted industries. This particular service provider offers superior gateway technology with effective fraud protection, fast application and approval process, diverse solutions to cover most merchant categories and sizes and on-time payout on a weekly basis.

Since there are a lot of providers for merchant accounts or payment gateway services, you have to be careful in choosing the right one for your business. You have to know if they provide other services other than the basic merchant account acquisition. It would be better if the one you’re choosing has multiple bank acquirers that are established or at least reputable. Furthermore, you also need to know charges such as upfront fess. It should also be clear whether they charge on a per transaction or monthly basis.

Adult site webmasters usually go through a dilemma when selecting the appropriate adult merchant account for their businesses. Choosing an adult merchant account via keyword search in search engines is disheartening since a single search string can yield a wide range of resutls – of course you still have to filter these in order to come across a good merchant account provider, but it is much more difficult to identify from the list which one is the right one– the adult merchant account provider that could cater to the needs of your website.

Being an adult merchant places you in the high risk category. As such, one of the difficulties that you might come across would be provide a ton of supplementary documents for your business. Another one would be high processing fees. Saving a few pennies is great; however, basing your evaluation on the prices offered by merchant account providers might be impractical. After narrowing down your merchant account candidates, here are few questions that you might want to address before you pursue your inquiry:

1.   Do they understand what I need? It is not really that easy to find a payment processor that caters exclusively to your needs as an adult site owner. If you are lucky enough to find one, how do you know if their services really are geared towards your needs? One way is to know if they can provide you with the uptime any adult site needs. Choosing a payment processing partner that lists availability as one of their main focuses is a wise choice.

2.   What kind of security does the payment processor offer? 128-bit SSL encryption is already the industry standard. It now comes down to how far your payment processor can push this security promise. Find out more about the specs of the processor’s payment gateway. Adult sites are heavily dependent on fast and flawless technologies, try to find a processor with a tight security system that match the needs of the adult industry.

3.   Can they help me curb chargebacks? Chargebacks happen for a lot of reasons, not always within the adult merchant’s control. Another issue you must grasp as a high-risk merchant: Credit card associations (like Visa and MasterCard) have systems in place that may get merchants who have a high chargebcack ratio banned from accepting credit cards. This is the cold, hard truth. A payment processor with effective fraud scrubbing measures may be able to prevent you from getting into that blacklist.

4.   Does the payment processor offer customized service? Let’s face it. We all want to be a little different. Being an adult site, it’s hard enough to compete with a million other sites with the same services on the Internet. Having a payment processor who can give you all that you need is great, but having one that lets you customize its services specifically for your site is way better.

5.   Will I get my money on time? Let’s not beat around the bush, the reason your adult site needs a payment processor in the first place is so you can milk a bit of cash out of all the hard work you’ve done. And rightly so. You deserve that money, so you should look for a payment processor that would be able to guarantee you consistent payouts. A payment processor’s ability to take care of its financial liabilities is deeply rooted in the efficiency of its processes. So, that also worth looking into.

There are still a lot of questions that need to be asked before acquiring a merchant account provider. However, these basic ones could help you identify if the merchant account provider that you are selecting is the right one for your adult business.

Mary Harkness here. Welcome to my blog dedicated entirely to high risk businesses. While I’ve been in the field of online marketing (and marketing in general) for a considerable amount of time, nothing has ever piqued my interest more than the world of high risk ecommerce. It’s probably the fact that every aspect of each high risk industry is more challenging than regular businesses that gets me all riled up.

This blog will basically be home to a general collection of articles I’ve written about the topic. From acquiring a merchant account to dealing with the everyday problems that plague the high risk merchant — I hope to be able to share with you little nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up since working directly with high risk businesses.

Have fun and keep coming back for more.