Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Why You Need A Merchant Account, Bloggers

May 20, 2009 | Feature, Making Money

Banner ads and affiliate offers are only going to take your quest for income from your blog so far. Before long, you’ll realize that selling things and making your own offers is where the real money is at. When you sell things, you need a way to process orders. That is where your merchant account comes in.


What Is a Merchant Account?

Credit Cards For those not accustomed to the terminology of ecommerce, a merchant account is simply a line of credit extended to a business which allows that business to accept credit cards. The merchant account acts as a go-between between the credit card company and your own business account. When a customer buys something with their credit card, there is a small loan taking place to your business until the transaction is fully settled and all funds have transferred.

For this reason, it is a line of credit. To get a merchant account, you actually have to go through an underwriting process and credit check. However, at the end of it, you will have the capability of charging credit card orders.

To put it simply, you NEED to be able to charge credit cards in order to do ANY business on the Internet.

Why You Need A Merchant Account

My readers know that making offers of your own is the way to maximize income from the Internet, including blogs. To do that, you need to be able to charge credit cards.

You can do this with Paypal. Paypal is certainly easy and it forgoes the need to have your own merchant account. That said, there are risks. Almost any online business person will tell you that you don’t want to run huge sums of money through Paypal because you run the risk of losing your account or having your funds frozen.

See, Paypal is, in essence, allowing you to use THEIR merchant account. They need to safeguard their own account by ensuring things like fraud and high-refund rates don’t happen much. So, when Paypal sees anything which potentially hints at a problem, they flag it and react by freezing the account until they can figure things out. During this freeze, you are simply out of luck and out of business. You won’t be collecting any more money nor getting the money already paid to you until Paypal is happy that you’re not a scammer.

So, I do recommend you use Paypal, but not DEPEND on it. This means you should have your own merchant account and a way to process cards directly.

Where To Get Your Merchant Account

A quick search for merchant accounts will show that there are TONS of businesses out there vying for your business. You can even go to your local bank (more than likely) and get one.

There is an opportunity, though, that I recently became aware of and it is perfect for people just getting started in this game. It is Instant Merchant Accounts. This company has a very high approval rate for merchant accounts. Plus, the normal $295 application fee is being waived, making it completely free to get your merchant account now.

I want to be clear. You do not need to be a large, established business to get and have a merchant account. You can be a sole proprietor just looking to start making some sales online. It is still good to get a merchant account and get things set up.

Once you have your merchant account, it is really a fairly simply matter of using a simple shopping cart on your site (there are many available and many of them are free), connect it to your new merchant account, and you’re ready to start charging credit cards on your blog.

To get your merchant account application in place today, click here.

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  • I like all the great information you have presented here I would like to add that it is easier choosing a Greenlight Payments Merchant account because there are no contracts and we can help you integrate to your website for free.
  • I definitely agree. There are reasons to use paypal, clickbank, and other payment processors, but once you are at a place where you have a real business and want to take things to the next level, you need your own merchant account.
  • Joe
    I think the new paypal pro is good.
  • You can set MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate to only replace a few instances - anywhere from 1 to unlimited. It's under "Keywords to Ninja Links Options".
  • Gotcha gotcha gotcha. Defn. seemed a bit strange and out of character. Totally makes sense now and thanks for clearing up. Is there any way to set a limit per keyword per post? Might be a good upgrade for the developer to consider on future builds.
  • This is a well timed post for me. I am looking to get an online store up and running shortly so I will be signing up for a merchant account soon.
  • What is going on with the keyword slamming here?
  • Matty, that's just an auto-replace plug-in. MaxBlogPress ninja Affiliate, to be exact. :) I wish it only replaced one instance of the keyword, because it is overkill.
  • I heard about paypal having issues also. I think you need paypal, Google Checkout or your own merchant account. Like income streams you can't really rely on just one company. Greg Ellison
  • I have heard a lot of paypal issues. I am probably going to be looking into a merchant account soon. Pretty much everyone I talk to who is doing a lot of online sales has one.
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