February, 2012:

In the quest for the top merchant equipment, we at Choice Merchant Services have narrowed it down to the following:

Best Retail Merchant Equipment: The Omni VX570, followed closely by the First Data FD100.

Best Tap & Go Merchant Equipment: The Vivopay 4000

Best eCommerce Gateway: The PlugnPay Gateway, followed closely by Authorize.net

Best Wireless Merchant Equipment, the Verifone VX670.

In 2011 a major news story broke about a McDonald’s employee who stole credit card information of clients and passed the data onto a black market organization that participates in identity theft:

The news story reads:

A 16-year-old girl working the drive-through had been skimming customers’ credit card numbers, targeting mostly white females in expensive vehicles.

The girl worked at the McDonald’s on 7th street in Monticello, but Haggerty believes she is part of a much larger credit card skimming ring that extends into the Twin Cities. Wright County is in the process of compiling the list of victims, but both Lino Lakes police and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office are involved in the investigation.

The sheriff says the female employee skimmed credit cards twice–once for the purchase and once for the number, which she passed along to a “larger organization.

Setting up your restaurant merchant services account with PCI/PED complaint restaurant merchant equipment will help to lesson your risks of being liable for credit card fraud and identity theft happening to your business. 

Aite Group released a study that said that payment card fraud, also know as merchant services fraud costs the economy $8.6 billion dollars per year – that’s $8,600,000,000 dollars.  When you accept electronic payments from your clients you are opening yourself up to merchant services fraud. 

Here are some things you can do to keep yourself projected:

• If you are accepting payments via the Internet, or over the phone, or through mail get setup with Fraud Trak2 from PlugnPay.
• If you are accepting payments in person, do AVS, address verification for all merchant services transactions.  All that you have to do is get the zip code of the person at the point of check out.  This has been proven to substantially reduce your cost of credit card processing transitions by moving you from a mid or non-qualified rate to a lower cost qualified rate.  It has also been proven to substantially lower your risk of accepting a fraudulent merchant services payment.  This means that your chance of charge back is much lower and your overall company profits will be better.
• No matter what, make sure that you are using PCI/PED complaint merchant equipment

If you do all of the above – you will be doing what you need to do to protect yourself and your business from payment processing fraud.

The biggest problem with accepting payment online is credit card fraud.  Every company that relies on ecommerce merchant services processing knows this.   Before my days in credit card processing, I ran an online Internet marketing company which was a pay for service solution.  At this point in time about 10% of our attempted orders were fraudulent.  This was a major problem for our business as it cost us lost profits and we almost lost our merchant account because of our high charge back rates due to fraud.

We solved this solution by upgrading our ecommerce merchant account gateway to PlugnPay’s FraudTrak2. Overnight, our credit card fraud stopped.  This tool set is the best tool set to stop credit card fraud on your eCommerce website.  I highly, highly recommend it.

Accepting credit cards online comes with the increased risk of merchant services fraud against your company.  Wath this 4 mintue video to learn about the warning signs of credit card fraud, and how you can protect your company.

A New report by CreditorWeb published a study that found that by not accepting credit cards companies are losing at much as 70% of their potential revenue.  The article summarizing this data pointed out a few things about merchant services and why it is so important you set your business up for merchant service processing:

• In the past 20 years due to direct deposit, most people do not carry much cash on them anymore.
• Starbucks, a company that has an average transaction size of$4, does the bulk of their business with credit card and debit card transactions.
• The average American carries at least four credit cards and nearly all Americans own a debit card.
• Most consumers prefer to pay with a credit card due to reasons like security and convenience.
• If a company does not accept credit cards it is deemed less trustworthy.

Heartland Payment Systems, which found itself involved in a large class action law suit in 2009, recently released its Q4 earnings report for 2011 and it was strong.  The company is making a rebound.

Heartland Payment Systems Inc reported a Q4 2011, quarterly profit that topped Wall Street estimates as the payment processor’s card processing volume in its credit merchant services business increased and costs fell.  It seems that the Durban Amendment is helping them as it is helping out most of the credit merchant services industry.

So do you have a blog like the Merchant Services & Business Insider that you want to promote?  Blogs are a great way to grow your business so it makes sense that you would want to promote them. Go to Technorati.com to get started.

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