Merchant Account Considerations for Multiple Websites

There are many businesses that use different websites to sell different products or services. In an effort to cut costs and simplify operations, they may be interested in using a single credit card processing account for all websites. Unfortunately, that is not possible, nor is it advisable.

There are several reasons why credit card processing companies will not set up such an account. They all have to do with risk. To begin with, the potential for chargebacks grows substantially when one account is used for multiple sites. The reason is that many cardholders will not recognize the billing descriptor on their statement, if the name is different from the name of the merchant they made the purchase from. Remember that eCommerce merchant accounts have high chargeback levels even at the best of circumstances. If you try to resolve the issue by placing a note on the checkout page to say that "Your statement will say XYZ Company", that is unlikely to have a significant impact, as customers are proven to associate their purchases with the name of the business that actually sold the product.

Equally important is that a merchant account processing bank will not be willing to underwrite a credit card processing account that will serve more than one websites. Again, it comes down to chargeback management. With separate accounts, if one of the websites generates high levels of chargebacks, it will be penalized and, possibly closed (if chargebacks exceed 1 percent), but the other one will not be affected. In the case of a single credit card payment processing service, both websites will be affected. If the account is closed, they will both lose their merchant services credit card processing capabilities.

Another factor to consider is that each website is evaluated separately and, in a single account scenario, if one was not approved, the whole processing account would not be approved.

Here is what we offer to e-commerce businesses.