Instant Merchant Account

About Instant Merchant Accounts

An instant merchant account is necessary for all merchants who want to have an online presence. In an online business, the monetary transactions are normally done through electronic means, predominantly through credit cards. The advent of Internet has opened new vistas for vendors to sell their products and services online without the restriction of geographical borders and boundaries. In order to facilitate online acceptance of payments, a vendor is required to acquire a merchant account from a merchant account provider. The increased use of Internet for carrying out business transactions has led to an enhanced demand for merchant accounts from all over the world. This has resulted in considerable competition among the merchant accounts providers with many new international agencies wanting a fair share in the business.

What is an Instant Merchant Account?

One outcome of the increased competition amongst the merchant account providers is the advent of the instant merchant account. The account providers, while vying with each other to win more clients, promise the issue of an instant merchant account for a specific price.
While the promised ‘instant’ can be as small as one or two seconds, the fact remains that the so called instant merchant account is only placed at the disposal of the merchant. This too only after the provider agency has received the online application, checked its correctness along with the vendor’s credibility, and then had approved the issue of the instant merchant account.
All this action involving issue of an instant merchant account certainly takes a little time. It should be appreciated that any instant merchant account provider will want to satisfy itself of various facts with regard to the vendor’s eCommerce business history as well as his eligibility for issuance of an instant merchant account.
Secondly, the provider also requires time to tie up with a designated bank on the application before deciding to issue the instant merchant account. Yet, all said and done, these merchant account providing agencies certainly create the instant merchant account by issuing the credit card Merchant ID number as quickly as possible and certainly take considerably less time than required for the issue of a non-instant merchant account.
The various instant merchant accounts offered by the international agencies include offshore instant merchant accounts, third-party instant merchant account.