Accurate, useful merchant account reviews do exist, but they’re not always easy to find. Many reviews aren’t worth the time it takes to read them, but there are helpful ones out there and we’re going to show you how to recognize them.This article explains the downfalls that plague many merchant account reviews and it shows you how to tell the useful from the useless.
Merchant account reviews are often presented in the form of a table that compares rates and fees offered by various merchant service providers how to sell merchant services. These tables are nice to look at, but that’s about the extent of their appeal.Credit card processing rates and fees aren’t structured like the typical retail pricing that we’re used to. Sales agents don’t operate with fixed pricing, instead, they use a range of rates and fees to create offers based on what the market and the competition will allow.
In a company with 50 sales agents, it’s theoretically possible for a single merchant to negotiate 50 different rate and fee packages just by talking to each agent individually.Many online reviews are created by affiliate marketers whose goal is to create sales for the company that is the subject of their review. For obvious reasons, affiliate marketers are biased toward their partner provider. Later on we’ll tell you how to spot an affiliate review.
Merchant service companies can employ tens or even hundreds of individual sales agents that sell merchant accounts under the parent company’s name. Quality of customer service, sales approach, experience and other important factors that create a good representative will vary from one agent to the next.Often, reviews that attempt to evaluate an entire company’s performance are really just focusing on a single agent.
Merchant service providers often specialize by focusing their product offering on a specific type of merchant account. Reviewers seldom recognize specialties and they lump providers together under general comparisons leaving the important information out.For example, a provider that specializes in offering wireless merchant accounts may perform poorly in a review focusing on Internet merchant accounts.
Going back to the idea that an entire company can’t be evaluated by the performance of a single agent, it’s easy to see how personal chemistry can make or break a business relationship.Some people work well together and others don’t. It’s very possible for the same merchant to give a glowing review for one agent and a poor review for another at the same processor. The review shouldn’t reflect on the company as a whole, it should reflect on the individual agent.