Merchant Accounts: What BIG Businesses Look For!

After years of helping all sorts of businesses with credit card processing services, many smaller businesses are all about price, while larger corporations that do volumes of 5 million a month plus look for different things in a merchant account provider. Businesses with large processing volumes look for: 1) Functionality, 2) Service, 3) “Fair” Rates. This is the order of importance to them. Where as I found that many smaller retailer seldom ask the same questions. Now I understand that when you have a small business, that every penny counts, however, price is NOT the “be all and end all” when it comes to choosing a merchant service provider. Regardless, of your size of company you need to understand why these “larger” sized companies see “Functionality” and “Services” as being more important than “Rates”.

When you are processing $100,000 plus a day, this means you are processing minimum a 250 transactions a day (assuming that your average ticket prices is $50), as opposed to where most small business will only do 250-400 transactions in a month. When your company does $100,000 a day you can not afford for your service to be down. If your service is down half a day, your company just lost $50,000 worth of sales as opposed to the small business who may lose $100-$400 in sales that day for down time. You can see as your company sales increase, you start to ask different questions because you see things from a different point of view.

Now, no company or product is flawless, including any merchant account provider, so all providers have some kind of downtime for various reasons (too many possibilities to list here). Since “any downtime” for companies with large sales volumes risk losing so much, the next question they have when seeking a merchant account provider is “how fast can you fix our Point-of-Sale Terminals?” They want a provider who is able to solve problems fast. Having a POS Terminal down for 48 hours is just not acceptable to a large processing company, they want the problem fixed in hours or minutes.

Notice how the last question they ask is “How much?”. Now I have to admit, very few large volume companies have to negotiate for low rates because every company will automatically bid competitively for their business, but the point being they don’t care who is cheaper by 10 basis points, even though this is when 10 basis points means 1000′s more in fees every year. The larger corporations understand, that their is more to lose with their sales when their credit card processing system is down then it is to pay a little more in rates, including customer sastisfication. As the saying goes, “you get what you pay for!” Companies that process large debit and credit card volumes are only looking for “fair” rates, they would rather pay more and know that their payment processing solution is reliable.

Next time you are seeking credit card processing services, you may want to follow suit with what larger companies find important when seeking those services: Functionality, Services, and lastly rates.