Choosing the right merchant account plugin can be a daunting task for any Web Development Agency. For it not being “in your wheelhouse” of knowledge and know-how, usually the easiest road of installation and workability has been chosen. However, many of the Large-Bin Providers who have their gateways in the plugins section of WordPress may not be the right choice for you or your ecommerce clientele.

You can make the right decision for your agency and consequentially your clientele with some simple term and function clarifications.

What is a merchant account provider?

The first thing you need to know is that a merchant account is a separate account that holds all the money your client receives when their customers’ payments go through. A merchant account provider will set you up with a merchant account, with their own Merchant Identification number, allowing them to process all credit and debit card sales through it, transfer the money into a designated business accounts, allows to dispute fraud against their account as well as chargebacks of those sales.

Large-Bin Providers – Stripe and Square

Those plugins above (just to name a couple) that you usually in the past found and used are geared for the highest risk for card processing which means higher than normal interest rates charged to transact business and a per-transaction fee to boot. Which equals to thousands of lost funds per year going to the Large-Bin providers, and not to the merchant. They are swapping the ease of installation with the higher interest rates and fees charged to the user. And how they are set up internally, doesn’t allow any merchant using their processing to dispute any fraud or chargebacks. Costing even more money to the merchant using this as an Ecommerce processor.

Fees from Stripe and Square

They are usually 15-20% above normal interest rates (where they are charged a percentage of a sale to process online) but they are also charging a per-transaction fee that is .15 cents to .20 cents. Which at first look, doesn’t seem much but as your clientele’s monthly volumes go up it definitely takes a toll.

Additionally, merchant can be assessed monthly or yearly charges, again, taking from the revenues of the merchant, your client.

PCI Compliance Standards

For using a payment gateway online, it is usually required (even before Chrome started to look for it) having additional security, or the SSL Certificate as a front line security measure to protect the financial data on the site. Most SSL Certificates do just fine to answer the need for the Credit Card Industry’s requirement for being PCI Compliant.

There are of course additional steps for security you can add (we have a few options, find out more here) that can make it safer to transact business on the Internet.

These are the first Card Processing Terms you, as a web developer, are more likely to come across. We are here to assist you in getting the best solutions your agency can provide to your clientele.

Please look into our Complete Solution, FigPay360 Ecommerce Suite to find out more on how you can do that