We are putting together a program so that business owners can get a breakdown of exactly what they are paying for their credit card processing from an industry professional.

Processing statements are confusing at best, and they often make absolutely no sense at all. We are providing a free, professional, objective breakdown of any businesses processing statements. We will show you exactly how much you are being charged and where you are being charged. This is a great way to find out exactly what fees you are paying and find out any miscellaneous fees, monthly fees, unnecessary fees, downgrade charges and everything else that you may not have known about.

You will need to fill out the rate analysis form and then email or fax a copy of your statements in. The location to email or fax your statements is provided once you fill out the rate analysis request.

I was clued into a great tool made by google in the google lab, by Rand of Seomoz. It’s called Google Trends and it is a system that will let a user view a graph of the search volume for a given search term over time.

Naturally, I wanted to see how the top terms relating to credit card processing look. I would consider the top terms to be: Merchant Account, Accept Credit Cards, Credit Card Machines, and Credit Card Processing. For this article I searched for the first three.

What I found was an extremely troubling and unexpected graph.

Not only was this line sloping in the exact opposite direction that I was expecting, but the slope is much steeper than I ever could have expected. I added the red line to show a linear path of the slope of the line.

Since the beginning of the chart (2004), until now (2006), there has been a linear 50% reduction in search traffic for terms relating to credit card processing. The beginning of 2004 is coincidentally when we started actively competing for these related terms, and we also began advertising with Google and Overture pay per click programs. Since the time we started, the average cost per click across all terms in our industry has at least doubled. Pay per click adversing costs, are also a decent indicator, of the amount of competition for natural traffic.

What this means for websites relating to credit card processing is that the potential customers are searching on the internet 50% less now than 2 years ago, and the competition has increased by 100% or a factor of 2. Putting this all together, the merchant services field on the internet is now 400% more competitive than it was 2 years.

I’m not sure how accurate this graph is from google, and it is in a testing area of their services. The data itself is against everything I have read and calculated about the trends of traffic on the internet. But, it is a very interesting look into two ways that competition increases in business. I am interested to see if other industries experience the same trend.

Paypal is now offering a system that lets members send payments via their mobile telephone. The system operates securely, and transactions still carry Paypal’s limited protection. There are several companies that already accept paypal mobile payments, and there are also a number of charitable organizations ready to accept donations.

What a great idea right?

Actually, I cant really see any use for a mobile payment system like this, neither as a pier to pier or a consumer to business system. Obviously, businesses that operate in mobile environments make great use or mobile processing. But as for a consumer, breaking out a cell phone, calling paypal, entering the transaction information, waiting for their confirmation phone call, entering your pin number, and then hoping that everything goes through correctly just seems like excessively complicated for most people to want to do. Secondly people are never quick to adapt to a new idea, no matter how great it may seem. If the internet were a bit less convenient, then maybe this system could have a running chance, but In my opinion, this is a flop. Time will tell..

News Article: Paypal launches Paypal Mobile

Well, the blog has finally started to rank in the search engines. It has been drawing traffic from small obscure search terms for a while, and I just found it climbing the ranks for a much more competitive search term, ‘merchant account’ and ‘merchant accounts’. Looks like its ranking 45 and 66 right now, and since it was nowhere a month ago, that’s a huge improvement. Anyway, thank you to anyone who is linking here, and thank you to anyone who stops by the blog.

As always, let me know if there are any topics you would like to see on the blog.

Thanks
Jamie

There are so many merchant service providing companies in the US, that searching for a good one can seem like an overwhelming task. Nearly every provider you encounter will be offering their version (or the same version) of what they can do for your business. In the world of merchant services, there are a few good companies and there are a lot of bad companies. A bad company is what I would define as a company that is looking to rip off unsuspecting businesses. New business owners are often so busy planning the other parts of their business, they become an easy target.

How do you find out if the company that you are going to trust your money to is a good company?

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About a day after I published the article about PCI and CISP compliance, Nigel Ravenhill, the Marketing Director for Scan Alert contacted me about the article.

A Little about Scan Alert:
Scan Alert is by far the leader in PCI / CISP scanning. They offer PCI / CISP scanning for just about every type of online business imaginable. Scan Alert serves 72 countries and offers packages for anything from non-profit, to mega websites. Scan alert customers also get to display a hacker-safe logo on their websites letting visitors know that their website is scanned daily and the transfer of information is secure.

Nigel also sent me last years Digital Window Shopping Report, which is a study involving shopping cart abandonment on ecommerce websites.

I have personally heard positives and negatives to using any Scan Alert like program, but their Digital Window Shopping Report has some great statistics about visitor behaviors and website usability.

Download the Digital Window Shopping Report

This is last years report. This years is scheduled to be released any day as I have been told.

The merchant account service of the wikipedia was finally updated. The section was severely lacking in a quality definition of what a merchant account is, and has now been updated. I took a look at the article and it is incomparably better than it was before. I personally dislike the entire concept of the wikipedia, but as long as there is going to be something about merchant accounts in there, it may as well be accurate.

The owners of http://www.merchant-account-services.org/ are the responsible party for the update. Well done…

A link to the merchant account page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account

Having a good payment processor is a paramount requirement to having your merchant account run efficiently and as low cost as possible.

The reason I say this, is that there are a number of payment processing companies that charge businesses for processing a transaction and for refunding a transaction. To me this sounds absolutely absurd. A business has to pay to process a credit card. Lets just say it costs 2% to process that card. Sometimes customers make returns. Its just a simple fact of business. Now, when you go and refund your customer’s card, its bad enough that the original 2% is not refunded to you, but to pay an additional 2% to send the money back to the customer is insane.

I’m not referring to a transaction fee for this. A transaction fee has to be charged on transactions in either direction. Transaction fees are fees for accessing processing networks, they are charged both directions because the processing networks are queried on charges and returns. I’m referring to processing fees, that % per transaction being charged both directions.

This is bad service plain and simple.

This is probably the biggest news in many years relating to the credit card processing equipment industry. Verifone Holdings Inc. is set to acquire Lipman Electronic Engineering Ltd in a merger of 2 of the largest processing equipment manufacturers in the world.

Lipman is the 3rd largest processing equipment manufacturer in the World, while Verifone is the largest. Lipman manufacturers the popular Nurit line of processing terminals, and while Lipman is only the 3rd largest market holder in land-line processing equipment, they are the undisputed leader in wireless processing equipment having a 90%+ market share in wireless terminals. Verifone’s wireless terminals have been accepted in other countries but are very limited in their use in the US. This appears to be a very smart and well founded acquisition for Verifone.

Hypercom who is the 2nd largest equipment manufacturer in the world, will look dwarfed by the size and market share in every area of Verifone. Hypercom’s terminals are very easy to use, reliable and low cost, so they appear to be in little danger for the time being.

I have made a list of available shopping cart software. The list is broken into free and paid, and separated further by the programming language that the cart is written in. Please let me know if you have a good shopping cart program that isn’t listed.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software