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QuickBooks Merchant Account Jail - Escape Plan

Until a few years ago if you wanted to use Quickbooks for processing credit cards you had to use Intuit’s very expensive merchant account services; you had no choice. Today there are several plug-ins on the market allow businesses to process credit cards through Quickbooks using almost any merchant account provider.
However, there is [...]

Best CRM On The Web

Merchant Account - Retail or MOTO? Part 2 of 2

Pricing Difference Between a Retail and a MOTO Account
Both Visa and MasterCard see a card not present (CNP) transaction as a greater fraud risk than when a card is present and swiped. Therefore, both have a .31% surcharge on CNP transactions. So let’s say you have a base discount rate of 1.85% on [...]

Merchant Account - Retail or MOTO? Part 1 of 2

Let’s start off with what Retail and MOTO mean:
MOTO = Mail Order Telephone Order, credit card card not present.
Retail = Store where card is present and swiped.
As you many be able to tell by the above definitions, the key issue that defines what the account should be is whether or not your customers credit card [...]

Reality Check - How Many Minutes Have You Wasted?

It was my 43rd birthday the other day and one of my children, Corrie, made me a Power Point presentation to mark the day. One of the slides gave some statistics about my life. The key stat that stood out to me was the one that revealed how many minutes I had lived. [...]

Friday’s Challenging Quote

How To Read Your Credit Card Processing Bill

Here is a link to an article published in Inc. Magazine. Its focus is on how to decipher a merchant account statement. It’s a short read form an unbiased third party, check it out:
Cracking the Code - Credit Card Processing Bills are a Jumble. Here’s How to Read Yours.
By Jennifer Gill

What is Straight Pass Through?

Not having straight pass through for your merchant account is just plain wrong!
Simple put, straight pass through is receiving all of your merchant account surcharge fees at "true bank cost." This means that when you have a transaction that is not "normal," such as rewards, commercial, business cards or if the card is [...]

Counterintuitive Monday

I was able to do a little Sunday morning reading from one of my favorite easy reads, “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be” written by Paul Arden. As I read the pages realizing how counterintuitive and unreasonable the ideas are in the book I thought to myself [...]

Blogging Dilemma - Getting Paid For a Post

I love Google! Almost every day they send me various e-mails with lists of web page and blog offerings for words and terms have previously selected. It is called Google alerts - set your alerts up here.
Anyway, since I work with merchant accounts, one of my alerts is for “merchant accounts.” Lately [...]

Paying Too Much for Your Merchant Account? This Test Will Reveal the Truth!

So you have a merchant account and you have a feeling you are being overcharged but you are not certain. Here is a easy test to reveal the truth. Visa says that a Rewards I card (card present and swiped) should have a surcharge of .11 added to your base rate. So if [...]

Local Max and Big Max

Today was a very rough day. When I went out to lunch (chicken bake at Costco) I took several books along to read, primarily to freshen up my mind with some new thoughts. The book I ended up reading was Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big. I randomly turned to page [...]

Best Web Based Solution

Have you ever considered switching to a web based or virtual terminal? I know it sounds complex but if you can purchase a book at amazon.com then you can use a virtual terminal.
http://www.skipjack.com/merchant/demos/solutions/

Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills

So here I sit killing time, surfing around various business blogs on my day off. See, I have two large projects that I have to complete by the end of the day and they have become mountains, giant snow covered, wind blown, Himalayan type mountains that scream that they overwhelm me if I [...]