What is the Difference Between a Merchant Account and a Payment Gateway? By A. Nutt At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

If you decide to open an ecommerce store, you are going to have to become familiar with merchant accounts and payment gateways. In order for you to receive funds from an online transaction, you will need to have some sort of merchant account. Although your bank can probably provide one you should plan on paying dearly for it. If you do not want to do this you can check into the more popular ecommerce merchant accounts available online. With ecommerce becoming so popular, gaining a merchant account has never been easier.

Payment gateways act as a sort of go-between for the sellers shopping cart and the financial institutions involved in the transaction. Gateways are not visible to the shopper and handle the transaction between your customer’s financial institution and your merchant account. This is all done behind the scenes when the customer clicks "buy it now" or enters the checkout.

There are also third-party credit card processors such as Paypal. They do charge more per transaction but there is no monthly fee. This is best if you are just starting out in ecommerce and are unsure of how the payment process works. Almost everyone has a Paypal account. Once you are on your way to becoming an established business, you will want to check more thoroughly into merchant accounts and payment gateways to save money.

All transactions go through the payment gateway. They provide information to and from the buyer’s and sellers financial networks. Once this is done, the money from the seller’s account goes into your merchant account.
It is extremely important that you check the differences in rates before choosing a payment gateway and merchant account. Don’t settle on the first company you come across. Do some investigating or you may end up losing money and fast. Check the services and the rates for both payment gateways and merchant accounts. Ultimately you will want to get the most services for the most reasonable amount of money. That doesn’t always mean the cheapest. You often get what you pay for and that goes for ecommerce as well.

There should be no hidden fees involved in any type of merchant account or payment gateway. Fees should be laid out for you to see. If you do not see a complete list of charges that would be incurred, do not use that service. There are reputable services and not so reputable services so know what you are getting.

Merchant accounts act on behalf of the seller whereas a payment gateway is an information port for all of the financial networks involved in the transaction. This includes the buyer and the seller. Businesses must have both a payment gateway and a merchant account if they are not using a third-party service. Without a merchant account a seller cannot receive money from an online transaction. Without a payment gateway, the transaction cannot take place at all. This is the major difference between the two.

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