What is a Merchant Account?
Any seller who wants to sell goods and services on the Internet sooner or later becomes interested in a merchant account and wants to know what a merchant number is. A merchant account is a special trading account to which you can accept payments from bank cards 24/7, regardless of the working hours of the acquiring bank. Even if the client makes a purchase in the middle of the night or on the weekend, the funds will be credited to your merchant account. The main advantages of merchant services for eCommerce are as follows:
- You can significantly expand the geography of your business, as you can accept payments from different countries;
- For customers, the cost of paying to a merchant account is usually lower than the cost of a regular bank transfer;
- The owner of a merchant account can get all the necessary statistics on received payments in their personal account, track sales dynamics, and generate reports;
- Transactions comply with all modern security standards, including two-factor authentication and an anti-fraud system;
- If the acquirer offers multi-currency processing, international payments from cardholders will be credited without conversion.
Another important term is merchant identification number definition. MID is a special identifier given by the payment processing provider. It is used to identify the merchant as a business when a customer makes a payment.