Posted by Eliana,One of the very confusing things about doing business online is the establishment of an ecommerce merchant account. There are many, many websites that say you can get such an account from them. But what they don’t say right up front is that they are not the providers of such an account. They are merely acting as an agent for a bank, which is the real holder of the merchant bank account.
Then what is the purpose of these internet businesses? Basically, they provide a service as an intermediary between the merchant bank and the business. They are a credit card processing service, or gateway. They earn their fees by taking care of getting the card authorized by the customer’s bank, and by getting the money transferred from this bank to your merchant bank.
