Banks have lots of fees, and sometimes it takes a huge organization to parse these fees out in fair ways among merchant consumers. Individuals who want to go into business for themselves know that the best way to go is to have a business that offers sales by credit cards. One must set up a merchant account service with a sales agent of a bank to acquire rights to use Visa or MasterCard services.
Services like AcceptWithUBC.com help one negotiate waters for setting up card-not-present transactions. These services are independent sales organizations or merchant service providers that act as bank agents. Representing credit lines offered by banks, they are able to extend those credit lines to merchants by giving them a merchant account that can accept online credit card sales.
The major risks with credit cards are chargebacks. Banks don’t want to face chargebacks for their merchants, but they have to cover the risks. A chargeback may occur for various reasons. The customer never received the product from the merchant — there is no real point-of-sale — or someone else used the customer’s credit card for purchasing in a fraudulent manner. In this case, the bank that holds the credit card gets a request to remit the charges back to the customer. This could be a complicated process; hence, the bank is not willing to back up the small- or medium-size merchant in such transactions. Intermediary merchant account services help banks and merchants by taking over these kinds of risks.