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Does your Home Business need it's own Merchant Account?One of the issues you will have to decide on when you set out to build your home business enterprise is whether or not you really need a Merchant Account. You will of course also need to decide which kind of merchant Account you will need, as they are not all created equal. I can remember a time on the internet (from about 1996 to maybe 1999 or so) when you really had only some three choices: Your first option was your bank, if you had excellent credit and an upstanding reputation. If not you could take a step down and go with Texas based Card Service International. In this case they skimmed a little more off the top than the bank would (this is called the 'Discount Rate', but there is nothing about it that remotely resembles a discount). You also had less control over your merchant account than if you had gone directly through the bank, but again, that is more difficult to do. Your third option (if you had imperfect credit or were, like me, a young man with virtually no credit history at all) was to go with an outfit like DMR, Cybercash or Epoch which quickly approved you but left you with little control of your money and charged a high percentage of your customer sales for the privelage of using their service. But that was a long time ago in internet years. A lot of things have changed, especially with the dot-com crash and all. For instance, North Dakota (or perhaps South Dakota?) based DMR and a number of other similiar services went down around the same time as the dot com bust (DMR claims they went down due to excessive chargebacks among it's members which I can certainly understand.....both Visa and Mastercard are known to be very sensitive about the chargeback ratio that is incurred. Now is a different, leaner, meaner internet world for the home business entrepreneur and we have other options available to us such as paypal and in the future keep an eye out for a new service know as the Google wallet I believe. To keep you informed on new merchant account options for the home business entrepreneur here is an informative article by a superb work at home writer by the name of Shane Penrod. The name of the article is 'A Small Business Merchant Account'. I hope you find it as informative as I did. Shane's Resource Area or Author byline is located on the next page. More of his articles are alo available via an internet search. A home business merchant account may be just what you need to edge out the competition. If your customer base is growing or they are asking increasingly for credit payment options as well as for information about your products and services, a merchant account can answer their questions and help to grow your business while leaving your competitors in the dust. |