Example Scenario: Your website is finally gaining traffic and your online business is looking like is going to produce profits:
1) You have captured your website visitor’s attention with good SEO, good content, and good sales copy.
2) You have generated an interest for your product and prospects desire your product/services.
3) Now you want to close the sale -- Immediately!!
The Problem: Without accepting credit cards you can't close the sale immediately! By not making as easy as possible for potential clients/customers to pay you, you know, you are certainly losing all your potential impulse purchases, and even some otherwise dedicated customers who simply become too frustrated to complete the purchase process.
So you finally decide to set-up a merchant account! You have decided to phone your local bank in Canada to setup a merchant account to sell your $20.00 widget on the Internet. Hopefully you can be all setup by the end of the evening and widget orders will be filling your email box from around the world by morning.
Getting a Merchant Account at Your Local Bank:
You phone your bank on Thursday, setup an appointment to come in next Monday at 10am to speak to a Bank Manager.
Monday Morning Day 1 The Bank Manager then tells you need to contact their Sister Merchant Account Company’s Account Executive to set-up payment processing on your website. So now you phone with the sister organization after wasting a time to go in to see the Bank Manager to find out that they cannot help you. After speaking with the merchant account service provider, they tell you to fax in all your business registration papers, identification and samples of your product you will be selling online. Excitedly, you head home to gather all this information.
Day 2 You finally tracked down all the necessary paperwork they said they would require to apply for an account and fax it in by noon’ish and now you expecting to hear back within the next 24 hours of your approved. You day dream that any minute now people will be ordering from your site like a dog on a bone!
Day 5 Worried, that you haven’t heard anything back yet, so you call your accountant executive that has been assigned to you and ask them what is your status, to only find out that you still have a bunch of forms to authorize. You then have these forms faxed over to you and the paperwork is 15 pages of lawyer jargon that does not make any sense to you.
Day 6 You call your account executive and ask him to explain the paperwork and what the fees are and he lists off the fees and rates and says none of it matters because this is only an application, and that they don’t even know if you will be approved.
Day 7 You begin to panic after watching more and more lost sales on your website occur you decide to sign-off on this 15 page application and fax it in.
Day 10 Still no merchant account.
Day 14 Monday comes along and now it is running into week 3 of trying to get set-up with a merchant account so you can simply accept credit cards on your website. So you decide to phone your account executive to inquire about the status of your approval. You find out that you have been approved, but with conditions. They either want a $7000 deposit or they want to hold 25% of your sales until it equals $7000 as a reserve account in case of any charge back scenarios.
Day 16 You reluctantly authorize the reserve by signing more lawyer jargon paperwork. You ask how long will this take? The account executive replies, “It should be approved in about five days.”
Day 21 You receive a call from your account executive and you are told that your account is conditionally approved, and you will receive your merchant accounts once you make sure that your ‘private policy, terms of use, and refund policy’ is clearly stated on every page.
Day 23 You contact them letting them know you have made the appropriate changes they requested.
Day 25 They get back to you, to say yes you did do what they requested and they will issue your merchant account numbers shortly so you can integrate them into your shopping cart software program.
Day 30 Finally, after almost a month from initializing your first appointment with the Bank, you now have a merchant account for your website and can now start accepting payments by credit cards.
Does this scene sound too familiar when trying to get a Canadian Merchant account?
Getting a Canadian merchant account is harder than one anticipates. Not to mention …expensive!
There are alternatives to the Bank and/or their sister organizations:
PayPal
This is the easiest way to get a merchant account online and most likely the cheapest if you just have a small product line. They will even let you sell in Canadian funds and deposit right into your Canadian bank account. They’ve been around for years and you know if E-bay uses them, they must be trustworthy and reliable.
Use a Merchant Account Specialist:
Merchant Account Specialist
A Merchant Account Specialist can save you time and help you make this administrative nightmare seem pleasant. They typically do your application for. Shop around from the competition in advance and can usually have most clients set-up and ready to go in about 2 weeks.
If you choose to do it yourself – Use your favourite search engine and type “Canadian merchant accounts” in it, you will find tons of links to research.
Whoever you decide to open a Merchant Account with:
Make Sure There Are No Hidden Charges! A good reference to have by your side is this article titled ‘The 17 Essential Questions Every Canadian Business Owner Must Ask before Choosing a Payment Processing Provider’
The best way to avoid any hidden or unexpected fees is to do your research…
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