Originally Posted by TheDoc

Wow, some crazy ass answers..

1) Having your own merchant account does not mean higher sales volumes. It means more control and sometimes that control means starting out with much higher scrubs.

2) Only companies with a proven track history of low chargebacks and refunds. This takes out the majority of large programs which is why the majority use 3rd party processing.

3) More support, staff, 24/7 phone/email support, having to watch every transaction, every rebill, all the time, 365 days of the year. Is a major undertaking for any company.

4) The owners ass is on the line, some want personal guarantees, and with #3 - that's enough for me not to pickup a merchant account anytime soon.

5) Huge companies can't just move to a merchant account. It would take them years to slowly move sales over. If they went to fast they could get into CB problems with the other processor.

6) The banks have limits to what they want. They may only be adding companies doing 100kish or lower amount monthly sales. Adding on a company that pushes 10m a year is a lot for a bank when they have ratios of high risk vs low risk accounts to reach.

7) With both 3rd party and Merchant accounts, you can view all transactions even decline reasons. You can customize your join forms an emails. You can customize almost the exact same thing across both.

8) With fraud scubs, yes a merchant account gives you direct control. But it isn't like you can just open up with the scrub open. It often starts tighter than the 3rd party processor and unless you run a ton notch support / login support system, you will keep your scrubs on just as tight as the 3rd party guys.

9) Staying with #8, if you run a top notch support system on a 3rd party processor, bringing your chargebacks / refunds / complaints down to almost nothing. You can talk to the processors and they can do 'magical' things for you.

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I have worked with plenty of clients with merchant accounts and plenty without.. Not a single program stands out because of a processor setup, cascade setup, ect.

Yes, processors and the banks can cost us sales sometimes due to 1000's of possible issues, just like your member that canceled because he didn't email support telling you he couldn't login in for 1 of 1000's of stupid reasons.