Membership and Product sales - Should you have a merchant account?
 

Hello everyone,

Netbilling has been receiving an influx of calls, emails and ICQs about people wanting to setup their own merchant accounts for product sales and memberships because of recent events. While I am in no way discounting 3rd party processing, there are many misconceptions about the differences between 3rd party processing and processing through a payment gateway such as Netbilling. We very often refer merchants to CCbill and others when we cannot help them, as they do us.

This will surely clear some things up.

Netbilling charges only 1.5% and 15¢ per transaction or 45¢ flat rate (your choice depending on your average ticket) for credit card processing (in addition to the merchant account rates). Merchant account fees range from 2% to 7%, depending on what you are selling and where you are located, of course.

Our check processing costs only 3.25% and 40¢ per transaction with no merchant account required of course. We also have a 24/7 call center option which not only will handle your customer service but will provide complete inbound and outbound telemarketing services as well. Many merchant experienced in the past that if they had their own merchant account, they would need to provide their own processing interface, fraud scrubbing, and customer service. This is what got us started back in 1998. We wanted to provide all of those services for merchants with their own account without taking on the risk of third party processing. This makes our merchants very comfortable knowing that Netbilling is not at risk in losing their merchant account and going under as so many have over the past few years. If a merchant has problems and loses their account, it does not effect any of our other merchants in any way.

If you are a merchant selling adult or mainstream products and are located in the US, Netbilling can help you establish a merchant account and processing usually the SAME DAY! ***As a matter of fact, if you mention I said so when you contact us, we will waive our usual $199 setup fee and the $45 bank app fee. *** We also provide a complete free shopping cart system for credit card and ACH/check processing or you can use an existing cart system such as Miva, Oscommerce, X-cart and many others. If you are located offshore we can help with product sales as well. However, the processing rate is higher at the offshore bank.

For paysites, we can setup merchant accounts both domestically and offshore and the total startup cost is approximately $2k which includes the Visa and Mastercard high risk registration fees. There is no reg. fees for Discover, Amex or JCB.
For adult paysites setup time is approximately 2-4 weeks realistically by the time the bank and Visa approve the sites.
Please note: IT IS ABSOLUTELY OK TO PROCESS WITH A THIRD PARTY (IPSP) PROCESSOR AS A SPONSORED MERCHANT AND HAVE A MERCHANT ACCOUNT FOR THE SAME SITES, JUST AS IT IS OK TO HAVE THE SAME SITES REGISTERED WITH 2 IPSPS AT THE SAME TIME. We often get merchants that switch to us or use us as the primary processor over third party processors. While you start new sales and rebillings with Netbilling, you current customer will remain at your current IPSP unless they will release the customer data for import into our system.

The nice thing is, once you have your merchant account setup, you can use additional processors with the same merchant account without having to pay the Visa and Mastercard registration fees again, in case you want to setup a backup processor/gateway.

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If you are questioning whether you volume is high enough to justify your own merchant account... If you are processing more than $1000 per month, have a business DBA, LLC or corp, decent personal credit, and a business checking account, you are good to go. For offshore, you must have an EU corp. to work with one of our banks and have decent established monthly volume.
If not, we suggest using an IPSP (3rd party processor).

Advantages to having your own merchant account and using a gateway such as Netbilling include lower transaction fees (compared to 3rd party processing), same day payouts for domestic merchants and weekly for offshore. You will also typically get higher conversion ratios due to the fact that you can set the scrub levels for your own sites, and control over your customer's data with the ability to export all customer data to another processor (whch is a big deal in the current climate).

Disadvantages include the fact that you must do your own affiliate payouts (or use the payout service by affiliatetracking.net or another) and answer to chargeback retrieval requests.

If you do not keep your chargebacks under 1%, you stand the possibility of losing your merchant account, just as with using an IPSP.

Almost all outside affiliate programs work well with our system such as Affiliatetracking (Taboorevenue), X3, MPA3, NATS etc...

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Again, I am not discounting 3rd party processing in any way. Some of my good friends in this industry work for or own third party processing companies.

Not sure if we left anything out here. Questions or comments?

Thank you, Mitch Farber

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Mitch you guys never fail to make make me laugh (in a good way) :thumbsup

Regards,

Lee

Thank Lee - I think!

Mitch

Mitch at Netbilling it a top notch guy. I have had 2 main stream merchant accounts via them for some time ..

We at Yanks just got our shop merchant account to process sales for vsh tapes and other things we sell..

It is deff worth looking at this option and I highly trust these guys.

:thumbsup

Thanks gateway - We appreciate your friendship and your business. You and the Yankscash crew are awesome!

Mitch

No that was definately a complinent bro :)

Regards,

Lee

We just started processing with our products account yesterday, and hopefully our membership account by the end of the month. Everything is going smooth as can be. The People at netbilling are personable and provide excellent customer service. I would highly recomend them.

:thumbsup

Well that's utterly bizarre.... I spoke to one of your sales rep on your live chat today and they told me EU companies needed to be processing $250,000 per month!

Nice post :thumbsup

This is good to know :thumbsup

informative post, bookmarked it for future reference

Very Informative Mitch, and I do have to say excellent support at Netbilling! They take good care of me and my kids
:thumbsup

Hi,

I just spoke to the sales rep that chatted to you this morning and she told me that she did not get to finish. We actually do have an option for smaller EU companies. Can you email me your processing volume and contact information as well as you url(s)?

Thank you, Mitch Farber
[email protected]

Mitc, can my partners and I set up a merchant account from Panama with you? or do you allow US only?

Hi,

For outsiode of the US, it must be an European corporation.

Thank you, Mitch Farber

great post

Mail sent Mitch... thank you :)

And apologies to the sales rep for my hasty departure this morning, I assumed she had finished her reply and I needed to work a lot harder to earn the $3mil a year ;)

No apology needed. Karen will get with you shortly.

Thanks, Mitch

You know how I feel Mitch & Crew. You guys rule!

Z

This is a very helpful post to some of the newbies out there as well as some veterans. We have been using Netbilling for over four years now and we have referred several clients their way in the years past. Not for commissions but because when our clients would rather have an merchant account than an IPSP we prefer them to go with a company that knows what they are doing.

As for their gateway uptime.... I cannot remember more than a couple of times in the past 4 years that they have been down.

In short they know what they are doing.

Also just a note, we will be announcing some changes at TabooRevenue next week. We are in the process in securing some special offers from our friends like Netbilling and others that our new clients will be able to take advantage of when joining us.

Cannot say anything else right now, but the feedback we are already getting is great. Thanks guys, and to any of our competitors than come in here posting under fake nicks, your questions will be answered next week :Graucho

Thanks again Mitch for the post.

Hi Mitch,

Are you saying taboo revenue, can send checks/wires to OUR webmasters? If so, any idea what price they charge per check/wire?

Andre

What kind of volume is required for offshore?

Hey, justsexxx:

We can pay your webmaster commissions via check, wire transfer, direct deposit or epassporte. There is a 2.50 fee per check, no fee for epassporte or domestic direct deposit/wire transfers. International transfers are $20 per.

If you'd like more information, please contact me directly at mandy at tabootracking.com

Great post at the perfect time!

I'll be calling today around 3pm to set up an account to sell our new panty fetish DVDs!

Mitch & Karen have been a pleasure to work with, helping us to navigate the process last year when we set up our account

For EU solutions where is the account setup and what is the minimum transaction volume?

Looking forward to it. Please speak to our Sales Manager Karen Campbell and I will give her a heads up on your call.

Thank you, Mitch Farber

Since there have been so many new inquiries today in other threads, I thought I would bump this post.

Mitch

Mitch, what EU banks do you work with?

Old thread... unanswered

We have several optoons for EU and other regions, especially domestically here in the US.



Thanks, Mitch

Very nice post, you cleared some doubts I had!

He already did that in 2004:1orglaugh

Nice break down...

Most of you were not around back then :-)
Mitch