A Virtual Terminal is Vital for Online Business

There are a lot of people who start an online business, looking at the costs of credit card services and wondering if they can afford them. And it’s a fair question.

You are going to incur some monthly fees no matter which merchant services company you sign with. They are, after all, providing a valuable service – giving your customers an avenue to pay for their purchase using their credit card. And they are going to become a de facto partner, for the same reason. If they drop the ball people won’t be blaming them – they’ll come looking for you.

And for these reasons you should be willing to pay a bit more to know that you are dealing with a solid provider of merchant account services. As you have heard several times during your life you get what you pay for. But to turn the phrase around, you don’t get what you aren’t willing to pay for.

Just as you don’t expect a Hyundai to perform as well as a Porsche, you can’t go with a discount provider and expect to get the same level of service. Pay less and you should expect less.

However, there are some other considerations. If your business is not driven by a high number of sales because you sell big-ticket items your per transaction fee can be a little higher. However, if you expect to sell a high volume of items you are going to want a plan where the transaction fee is lower.

Going back to the original question that we started with, let’s alter it slightly – can you afford not to accept credit cards? We’ve been talking about some of the costs involved in credit card processing and how they affect your business internally. Now let’s spend some time looking at external effects that will be caused by not offering a virtual terminal and a secure payment gateway.

Though estimates vary, economists that track retail spending say that people spend billions annually when they shop online – which among other things shows how much of a factor Internet retailing has become in today’s economy. And 80 percent of everything bought online is paid for using a credit card – so the ecommerce retail sector of the economy is accounting for 80 percent of the billions being spent.

Stir into this equation that people who shop the ‘net and want to use their credit card do not look kindly on sites that do not offer merchant account services and you can see that not being set up to accept payments online is a major mistake – one that can cost you customers and their business. And online shoppers have too many choices to have to deal with a site that does not offer them what they are looking for. Once your site falls off their radar it is gone for good.

And here’s something else to consider. There are few sites that are offering a product so unique that they can dictate the payment terms to consumers. Most online business people are selling the same thing that other people are selling as well – they’re Target competing with Wal-Mart. So to make your e-business as competitive as possible you have to make sure that no one will ever find an excuse to leave you site and take their business to the competition.

Jim Osterman is a Web content developer with SecurePay.com, a provider of premier virtual terminal solutions.