It is important to know what type of merchant account is going to work the best for your business. Know all of the things that may make your business a high risk and understand how to best high risk merchant account provider protect yourself and your business, not to mention your clients. The more that you understand about high risk merchant accounts, the better off you will be when it comes to protection.
Temporary Locations
If you do not have a permanent location for your business, then you may want to consider a high risk merchant account. These types of businesses usually make potential customers nervous. The nervousness stems from the customers inability to come back should they have a problem. With a business that jumps around from location to location could easily up and leave before a customer even receives their product. They would have a very hard time finding you and this could result in a very dissatisfied customer. Even if they receive their product, it can be unnerving to use a business that does not stay in one place for long.
Little Personal Contact
If you happen to have a primarily online merchant account, then you may want to also consider it high risk. The less person to person contact you have with your clients, the more high risk your business is considered. There are a lot of things that you could be putting yourself at risk for whenever you do not have any personal contact with any of your customers. It is important to know that just because your business could be considered a high risk account does not necessarily mean that this is a bad thing. You may be at a higher risk than other accounts when it comes to customer dissatisfaction because of the way that your business works more than your ability to serve your customers.
What High Risk Merchant Accounts Do
A high risk merchant account will be able to provide your business with several different services. While every account is different, they usually will provide the same type of services. They will break down the type of products or the specific services that you are selling and they will determine what to do with the best possible way of deliver as well as what the best methods of payment should be for your business. They will also have a periodic review of the fee structure as well as the risk status of your products and your business.
You can expect them to look over the relationship that you have had with other credit card processing as well as reviewing any previous charge backs that you may have had in the past.
There will also be training typically on the types of receipts, invoices or documents as well as the tracking information that you should keep versus what it you should throw out. You will be given multiple types of payment options as well. Anything from e-checks, debit or credit cards as well as several other types of payment options.