I needed to open a merchant account recently for a couple of our upcoming products and found the process to be less than enjoyable.

Over the past years I have mainly been a customer of Paypal, taking direct payments for purchases, but also setup a Paypal Pro account to directly take payments. The process of writing code to utilize the Paypal API always seems to take a lot of time and it can change over time.

So for two upcoming software-as-a-service products, we decided to standardized and pursue a gateway which used Authorize.net so we had a standard gateway and could change processors without changing our software.

Our initial foray through Authorize.net led us to a processor who was for high-risk accounts. I don’t know why we would be considered high-risk, Authorize.net could not tell us either. I think it is very important to know the terms and fees associated with a particular payment processor because they can be high. Without going into particulars, the fees we faced were astronomical and included a very high monthly fee, high transaction fee per transaction plus a high percentage as well as high minimums and high chargeback fees. Notice how I said ‘high’ a lot, which was the deal breaker. Read the fine print too, the fee for terminating with this processor was extremely high and was the #1 reason we chose to not sign up with them.

I came in contact with a small company, MerchantPlus, LLC, who was recommended to us. The initial attempt at the merchant account with MerchantPlus resulting in a declined account, because we stored data on Amazon S3 and the underwriting bank saw that as offering third-party services. The news was very disappointing indeed. The process of trying to explain to our customer service representative who then passes it on the the bank is a tough process. You would think that banks today would be used to Internet-based businesses and be able to at least understand somewhat the details. This is the problem with our banking industry, they are just too brick-and-morter to be very effective.

So, to my rescue, I received an email from the MerchantPlus President Zachary Smith indicating he would be working on getting us approved that day.  It took a couple days but he was successful in helping us get the account we needed. This my fellow business owners is how great customer service is done.  They could have just as easily tossed our application in the trash and moved on to the next applicant, but they didn’t, they went the extra mile to make me happy and it worked.  Oh, and I am now talking about my positive experience here.

Anyone needing a merchant account I would not hesitate to recommend MerchantPlus, LLC.  Their dedicated and personal support sold me.  Oh, I forgot to mention, their rates are fantastic too.