When you are looking to start a business, it is important that you have the right tools to make it successful. One of these key resources for any entrepreneur is getting approved for an Ecommerce merchant account. A merchant account will allow you to process credit card payments and accept online orders from customers.
This article will highlight some tips on how to enhance your chances of getting a merchant account approval so that your business can get started with all the right tools.
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Be Honest About Past Financial Issues
If you have had past terminated Ecommerce merchant accounts or other financial issues, make sure to be honest about it on the application. This will help them to verify that there are no problems with your current account request. If a problem does arise during your background investigation, then they will not approve the relationship but instead, deny it altogether.
However, if your termination was due to bankruptcy filing and your credit score has since improved significantly, then you may want to omit this detail from the application form in order to get a better chance of approval.
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Keep Your Personal Finances Under Control
The most important step to getting approved for a merchant account is ensuring that your personal finances are under control. This means maintaining low balances on all of your revolving lines of credit (credit cards) and avoiding any delinquency notices from creditors or collection agency inquiries in relation to delinquent accounts.
A bad financial situation can also lead to increased debt levels which might indicate high risk behavior with other types of lending such as personal loans and mortgages – something banks typically look out for when approving applicants for their various products.
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Be Ready To Work With Special Conditions
A Merchant account ecommerce application is a business contract. As such, the bank or financial institution wants to ensure that they are getting a good investment and not just another risk. The best approach for you in this situation would be to work with your prospective banking partner rather than against them on agreeing on what works for both sides.
What does this mean?
There may be special conditions put in place by the company when it comes to how much money can be transacted through the account each month, or what type of Credit card processing ecommerce transactions will need additional approvals from management. All these stipulations are designed to make sure that business stays profitable and sustainable over time.
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Renegotiate Only In Extreme Cases
The last thing you want to do is renegotiate your contract with a merchant account provider for their services. This will show that you are not happy with the company and there’s no point in doing so if they’re already successfully providing the service.
Renegotiation should only be done in extreme cases, such as when an agreement has been violated or breached by either party involved.
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Manage Chargebacks
Managing chargebacks is the most important aspect of managing your business. Chargeback management happens before and after a transaction takes place. But it should be done to prevent any possible transaction cancellations or reversals that could happen when someone disputes their credit card statement with you as the merchant.
Some merchants will find themselves in this situation if they do not have an adequate customer service team ready to answer questions about transactions right away because of high call volume or other reasons. Merchants may also find themselves in this position by declining fraudulent orders instead of making exceptions for those who are just trying things out (eBay does allow sellers to accept returns).
Conclusion
These tips can help you get a merchant account. They’re not guaranteed success but will increase the chances of getting approval if followed correctly and consistently.
