Merchant Account

A written, commercial bank account established by contractual agreement between a merchant/business and a bank and/or a payment gateway. The agreement contains the respective rights, warranties, and duties with respect to accepting bankcards like Visa or MasterCard. You must apply for this account directly from your bank, or from the Payment Processor.

After that, your bank may want to know the nature of your credit card transactions, and you can freely inform them that you will be using the Secure Payment Gateway system. While you are waiting for your Merchant Accounts to be activated, you can proceed through the next steps.

Under these steps, you need a SSL certificate for doing secured transactions. These may be available to you with your ISP or Web Host, and if they do not, then you can purchase one. Also, integrate your Shopping Cart/Accounting program into your web site. You will need to talk to your Web Host or Web designer in order to get this step correctly prepared.

If you will do only telephone payments, the above step is not necessary, because you will simply use Credit Card Transaction Interface page to process your payments. An online credit card processor will supply this Interface to you that you will call-up straight from your desktop when someone calls you with a payment.

Once you have your Merchant Account Numbers from your bank, you have to select the Secure Package best suited for your needs. Within a week, the credit card processor will set up your credit card processing and then you can be transacting credit cards online in Real-Time.