July 21st, 2016 by Elma Jane
Always ask for the card security codes:
CVV2 for Visa
CVC2 for MasterCard
CID for Discover and American Express.
Always use the Address Verification Service (AVS) and only process sales after receiving a positive AVS response.
Avoid using voice authorizations, unless absolutely necessary.
Billing descriptor must set up properly and shows your phone number. Customer can contact you directly if there is an issue,
Consider using the associations’ 3-D secure services:
Verified By Visa
SecureCode by MasterCard
A 3-D transaction confirmation proves card ownership and protects you from certain types of chargeback. An additional layer of security for online credit and debit card transactions.
Inform your customers by email when a refund has been issued or a membership service cancelled. Notify them of the date the refund was processed and provide a reference number.
Make available customer support phone number and email address on your website so that customers can contact you directly. You need to meet this requirement before opening a merchant account.
Make it easy for your customers to discontinue a recurring plan, membership or subscription. Have a no-questions-asked policy.
Notify your customers by email of each transaction and indicate that their cards will be charged.
Obtain a confirmation of delivery for each shipment.
Process refunds as quickly as possible.
Secure an authorization approval for every transaction.
Secure customers’ written or electronic signatures, for recurring payments or monthly fees. Giving you express permission to charge their cards on a regular basis.
Terms and conditions must be clearly stated on your website. Customers must acknowledge acceptance by clicking on an Agree or a similar affirmative button.
Transaction amount must never exceed the authorized amount.
You are required to reauthorize the transaction before settling it if an authorization approval is more than seven days old.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Security, Merchant Services Account Tagged with: card, chargeback, credit, customer, debit, merchant, merchant account, online, sales, Security, service, transaction
June 3rd, 2016 by Elma Jane
To be responsive to the needs of our merchants and to meet that needs NTC offers next day funding. This is a value added service for customers and businesses that need to have their funds available quickly.
With more than 15 years of experience, National Transaction offers a variety of electronic payment services and technology for businesses.
Our services include:
Currency Conversion, credit, and debit card processing, e-commerce and gateways, electronic checks, gift and loyalty card programs, mobile processing, cash advances and loans/funding program. We also have NTC e-Pay and MediPaid.
NTC e-Pay – is an Electronic Invoicing that made simple with NTC e-Pay! Free Setup, Nothing To Integrate, Secure, and Fast. Invoice customers Electronically with NTC e-Pay. Our e-Pay Platform can help Travel Merchants bring new customers and encourage repeat business.
Our Virtual Merchant Gateway – accept payments your way! Online, In-Store and On the Go. A payment platform that flexes with your business.
NTC Business Loans – Fast, Affordable, and Simple Application Process.
MediPaid – a medical health insurance claims payment. Delivering paperless, next-day deposits for Health Insurance Payments.
NTC provides services to thousands of customers. NTC maintains a one on one relationships with all its merchants providing them with 24/7 customer service and technical support!
To know more about our product and services give us a call at 888-9962273
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Check Services, Electronic Payments, Gift & Loyalty Card Processing, Medical Healthcare, Merchant Account Services News Articles, Merchant Cash Advance, Merchant Services Account, Mobile Payments, Small Business Improvement, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: cash advances, credit, Currency Conversion, customers, debit card, e-commerce, electronic checks, electronic payment, funding, funds, gateways, loans, Loyalty Card, merchants, Mobile Processing, service
June 2nd, 2016 by Elma Jane
Having the right tools to provide great service is important, this will make and keep your customers happy. An updated point-of-sale (POS) can help you improve customer satisfaction.
EMV – merchants are still behind in EMV acceptance. It may cost you to update but, it will save you money in the event of a fraudulent charge. EMV is here to stay, it is best to update your POS equipment now.
Insights – inventory management feature enables sales people to see available inventory. Tracking the products that sell the best and identifying products in high demand helps the owner stock strategically to better assist customers.
Loyalty Programs – an excellent way to keep current customers coming back.
Mobile Payments – Giving your customers more options on how to make payments by accepting mobile payments. Merchant gains the ability to speed up transaction times for customers.
Speed – customers want to check out at the store as quickly as possible. An updated point-of-sale solution will process transaction faster. A fast and easy system contribute to a better customer experience.
Need to upgrade your point-of-sale give us a call at 888-996-2273. NTC is here to help you.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: customers, EMV, Loyalty Programs, merchants, Mobile Payments, payments, point of sale, POS, service, solution, transaction
June 1st, 2016 by Elma Jane
Close more sales and overcome some of the common strategic mistakes sales people make with the following strategies.
Become a partner – people don’t buy from companies, people buy from people. Building a relationship with a potential partner by getting to know them personally and know their professional needs is very important in sales. Your potential partner must value you before he or she can trust you with their business.
Be the expert – Show your knowledge and expertise about your industry. Offer a valuable service and be the expert in your field.
Communicate – in building trust with a partner, establishing and maintaining effective communications is essential. Follow up in a timely manner, be available, return calls promptly with the information requested. Keeping communications open is the best way to keep a partner.
Eliminate the difficulty of switching – it is vital to let your partner know the ease of transition and benefits to moving to your solution. No matter how great the product or service is, when a business considered making a change there still apprehension.
Focus on value – build value. Most are willing to pay fairly for a good service.
Make it simple – make your product, service or offer simple. Explain your offer in a way they can not only understand but convey to others.
Hard work and dedication are important in sales, but you will close more deals if you have a good sales strategy.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: industry, product, sales, service, solution
May 24th, 2016 by Elma Jane
Top terms in your Merchant Statement:
Interchange – are the variable fees charged by the card payment networks for processing transaction. Credit card brands set these non-negotiable rates based on card type, business size, and industry.
Ancillary Fees – this include statement, batch and customer service fees, monthly minimums and more.
Authorizations – this section shows the charges per authorization that come from an interchange plus provider and is then split by card brand and transaction type. On your statement, you will see these charges as either AUTH or WAT charges.
Deposit Summary – following the summary is the deposit summary, where lists of your account activity broken down by day and card type.
Discount Rate – every transaction percentage that is deducted as a fee. Rates are categorized as qualified, mid-qualified and non-qualified.
Processing Services – this states your discount rate charges that you receive from your interchanges plus processor. This is divided by card brand and sales volume.
Summary – summary shows the processed sales by AMEX, Discover, JCB, MasterCard or Visa, as well as the total fees paid in order to process these sales. You can find this at the top of your statement.
Other items included in the summary:
Account adjustments, chargebacks, the breakdown of sales by card brand and number of refunds.
Understanding these terms on your statement will give you the confidence to read your merchant account statement with ease.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: card, chargebacks, credit card, customer, fees, merchant, merchant account, payment, refunds, service, transaction
March 23rd, 2016 by Elma Jane
Mar 21, 2016 at 2:14 AM
Hi Gloria, Cathy & Bill,
I want to thank the National Transaction Corp team for Gloria’s excellent help last week regarding a repeatedly declined transaction – which the customer insisted should go through. With Gloria’s assistance and information, our customer finally acknowledged there were insufficient funds and gave us a new card to run instead. The joy of dealing with the public!
In the bigger picture, her help that day is typical of the wonderful service your whole team consistently provides. When I call periodically, it’s because there’s a problem… and it’s usually about money… and it’s usually “the other guy’s” fault!
Your team always goes to bat cheerfully and gets results for us. In this age of electronic switchboards and giant financial institutions, I’m amazed at the personal attention and speedy resolution your team always delivers.
We get cold calls from banks or card processors almost every week promising better rates or some “great deal” to handle our transactions. Before they can explain their offer, I tell them I’m already working with friends in the business and hang up as quickly as possible.
You’ve earned my business and loyalty and I can’t say enough good things about your service. Thank you for all you do!
Sincerely, George
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: card, customer, service
September 12th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Over the last couple of years, Big Data has become a huge buzzword in the business world. Whether this data comes from social networks, purchase histories, Web browsing patterns or surveys.
The vast amount of consumer information that brands can gather and analyze has allowed them to improve and personalize their customers’ experiences. But for all the attention Big Data has received, many companies tend to forget about one application of it…Employee Engagement.
When done in the right way, tracking, analyzing and sharing employee performance metrics can be very beneficial for both you and your staff. One of the things that is very powerful is being able to analyze real-time information, boil it down into performance data and empower employees with reports from that data. If you can provide employees with data to do their job better in a succinct, actionable way, it’s very motivating.
The more Big Data can be incorporated into an intimate individual experience, the better. This demonstrates to the employee that the experience is not just off the shelf and that it is relevant to the person. This personal relevance is shown to deliver higher engagement.
Applying Big Data analytics to employees’ performance helps identify and acknowledge not only the top performers, but the struggling or unhappy workers as well.
If you want to introduce analytics technology to your employee engagement strategies, below are a few tips to help you.
Find a program that integrates with your current systems. For any new software that you implement within your company, it’s important to make the transition as seamless and simple for your employees as possible.
The software has to work where the employees work already. You can’t make them switch tasks and go to another platform to aggregate the data stream. The software should genuinely assist the end user. Your choice of software should be a grassroots decision, and you should have buy-in from your employees before you ask them to use the new system.
Consider how employees will view themselves and others. Once you introduce performance and engagement analytics into your company, you’ll have to consider how that program fits into employee relationships and workplace culture as a whole.
A company needs to take into consideration the actions of the employee’s co-workers and how to make these data points of interest to the employee. This helps to foster a respected and trusting engagement experience and data needs to be used to build trust. No matter what solution you choose, an analytics program moves you away from the traditional manual reporting process of performance measurement; helping make your staff more efficient, motivated and engaged.
Business software is in the beginning stages of being useful for performance measurement. Businesses have not pushed for innovation as hard as consumers have, but now that’s starting to change. Think about business processes in a different way and gather data in a way that matters.
Select and focus on the most important metrics.Analytics programs can pull and process data for a large number of metrics. Even when applying Big Data to customer service, many businesses struggle to keep up with the volume of information pouring in. Narrowing down your focus to only the most important key performance indicators (KPIs). Don’t introduce too many metrics, it becomes too difficult and confusing. If you can boil it down to some very simple statistics, like a score that incorporates the elements you want, everyone can focus on consolidated KPIs.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: big data, Business software, consumer, customer, customer service, data, key performance indicators, program, service, social networks, software, web, Web browsing patterns
September 10th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Merchant go into business to make a sale. They go to great length to advertise their business and then they make a sale and don’t track it… They don’t track the very customer they went into business to attract…That seems crazy…But now more companies are embracing the practice of collecting email addresses at the point of sale (POS) and they’re doing so with increasing regularity. An example, when customers are at the cash register, many brick-and-mortar stores now offer to email them receipts
Confidently collect email addresses at POS:
Your email service provider should be able to implement a text-to-join acquisition program for you that executes quickly and can be built specifically to mitigate the risks around POS data collection.
Instead of relying on sales associates to accurately input email addresses, your customers can use SMS to text their email addresses to your short code.
Customers receive an immediate SMS reply message letting them know to check their email for their receipt.
A mobile-optimized receipt is immediately emailed to the address.
This can be followed by an email inviting customers to join your company’s email program. Offering a purchase discount can increase opt-ins. New joiners can be sent an age verification email, if relevant.
Your welcome email, including discount coupon, is sent and the relationship starts off on the right foot.
Increasing your confidence about POS email address collection, a text-to-join program can increase your acquisition rates. It can engage those customers who prefer to provide their information privately via their mobile devices. It can help protect companies against potential blacklisting because of typos and confirmed opt-ins. It can even reduce overhead costs by saving sales associates valuable time. Understanding these important email address collection issues and adopting the prescribed best practices are critical to ensuring customers have a safe, positive and valuable experience with your company at the point of sale and beyond.
Virtual Merchant can collect data too, and as a provider we can help merchant use that data. We are committed to providing appropriate protection for the information that is collected from customers who visit the website and use the Virtual Merchant payment system. Policy Privacy is updated from time to time.The website is provided to our customers as a business service and use of the site is limited to customers only.
If the merchant never makes a sale before 10 why do they open at 9 ?? This is only one small example on how collecting data first and then analyzing that data can shape businesses and find money you may be throwing away ….
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale Tagged with: brick and mortar, business, cash, cash register, customers, data, discount, discount coupon, email, merchant, mobile, Mobile Devices, payment, payment system, point of sale, policy, POS, provider, purchase, Rates, receipts, sale, service, sms, store's, virtual merchant, website
August 29th, 2014 by Elma Jane
High risk credit card processing is electronic payment processing for businesses deemed as HIGH RISK by the MERCHANT SERVICES INDUSTRY
The high risk segment of payment processing has become more important as banks and ISO’s have begun to tighten up their credit restrictions and underwriting policies. Businesses are classified as high risk primarily because of their product or service and the way they go to market. In merchant services, risk is related to CHARGEBACKS or customer disputes.
The more likely a business to have chargebacks, the higher risk the business. For instance, online businesses selling a weight loss product through a free trial offer, is more likely to have chargebacks than a retail store selling the same weight loss product.
Merchants are often unaware their business falls into the high risk category when they first start shopping for a merchant account. Getting a high risk merchant account can be difficult.
These providers have more stringent requirements and the application process is longer compared to traditional merchant account providers.
High risk businesses should expect to pay higher rates and fees for payment processing services. As a general rule of thumb, merchants should count on paying at least more than a traditional merchant account. Most high risk merchant accounts also require a contract of at least 18 months, whereas low risk providers offer accounts without cancellation fees or contracts.
ROLLING RESERVES are also a big part of high risk credit card processing. Most high risk merchants have some sort of rolling reserve placed on the account, especially new accounts without any processing history. A Reserve refers to an account where a percentage of the funds from transactions are held in reserve to cover against any chargebacks or fees that the processor may not be able to collect from the merchant. This is similar to a security deposit, but merchants don’t have to pay it up front. Reserves are a pain point for many small high risk merchants, but they are definitely necessary and without them, processors would not accept any high risk merchants at all.
What Businesses Are High Risk?
As mentioned earlier, businesses are usually classified as high risk due to the product or service they offer, however merchants with severely damaged credit or a recent bankruptcy can also be considered high risk. Below are just of the few common high risk merchant categories:
Adult Websites
Cigars & Pipe Tobacco Online
Collection Agencies
Credit Repair
Debt Consolidation
E-Books & Software
Electronic Cigarettes
Firearms – Online
High Ticket & High Volume
Medical Marijuana Dispensaries
Multi Level Marketing & Business Opportunities
Nutraceuticals like weight loss supplements, cleansers etc.
Penny Auctions
Sports Betting Advice
Ticket Brokers – Online Tickets
TMF Merchants
Travel & Timeshare
Unfortunately this list is growing and some credit card processing companies even classify any start up Internet business, that doesn’t have extensive financials to be high risk. With the recent economic recession in the United States, there has been an increase in these start up Internet ventures. People are either looking to supplement their income or start their own business instead of looking for work.
How To Protect Your Business
Accepting credit cards is the single most important part of most online businesses. Unfortunately, many successful businesses go under after having their merchant account shut down. High risk merchants should always be cognizant of their merchant account and pay attention to chargeback percentages. Below are some tips for high risk merchants looking for payment processing solutions.
Be Upfront: Make sure your processor knows exactly what you sell and how you market the product/service. If they don’t accept your business type, keep shopping for a new merchant account provider. Many merchants will try to fly under the radar by not revealing all their products or fully disclose their marketing methods to the processor. This is a bad move, the processor will eventually find out the details about your business. This is usually from doing an audit on your transactions and contacting your customers.
Negotiate Every 3 Months: Credit card processing companies underwrite applications based on previous processing history. If there is no previous history, the account is riskier and the terms offered are usually more expensive and restrictive. You can always re-negotiate your rates, reserves and other contract terms with your current processor. Once they have 3 months of history to evaluate, they may be able to offer you a better deal. Three months of history is the magic number for most processors. If you applied without the previous history and were declined, there is a chance the same processor will approve your application if you provide 3 months of previous statements.
Prepare For The Worst: All high risk merchants should keep at least 2 active merchant accounts, from different providers. You never know when underwriting guidelines might change, or you may have an influx of chargebacks. Having a backup account or even multiple back up accounts is a good idea. Many high risk providers offer a load balancing gateway, which allows for multiple merchant accounts to be integrated into one payment gateway. This way you can spread transactions across multiple accounts, through one shopping cart/gateway.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: account, account providers, accounts, banks, card, chargebacks, contract, credit, credit card processing, credit restrictions, customer, customers, deposit, electronic payment, fees, financials, gateway, High risk credit card, High Ticket & High Volume, ISOs, low risk, marketing, merchant, merchant account, merchant services, multiple accounts, payment gateway, payment processing, processing services, processing solutions, processor, product, Rates, reserves, retail store, risk, ROLLING RESERVES, Security, security deposit, service, shopping cart, statements, terms, TMF Merchants, transactions, travel, underwriting
August 27th, 2014 by Elma Jane
An IT services firm, announced earlier this week that it purchased a majority stake in cloud-based travel management company. With the move,hopes to strengthen its travel vertical by using software-as-a service travel IT platform. The future of software services lies in blending models with customized solutions and services over different stages of an enterprise lifecycle and across different business segments within the enterprise. The platform combined with the strong management team and travel domain specialist will further strengthen competitive position in the travel vertical.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Travel Agency Agents Tagged with: business, cloud-based, company, domain, IT, management, platform, service, software, solutions, specialist, team, travel, travel domain, travel management, travel vertical
