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Friendly fraud is one of the most frustrating expenses a business owner will ever deal with. Friendly fraud is when a customer utilizes the credit card chargeback system to get a refund on a completely legitimate and honest purchase. It most often occurs in online business as it is very difficult for a business to [...]

It just goes to show that US government anti-trust regulations do not apply to B2B organizations! Verifone just acquired Hypercom corporation. This effectively removes all legitimate competition from the US credit card terminal market. Verifone’s own products have suffered a decline in reliability and quality starting 5 or 6 years ago, so naturally Verifone began [...]

Small retail businesses and restaurants are often faced with a tough decision when it comes to their method of customer checkout and the processing of customer credit cards. There are essentially 2 methods that can be used to ring up, and accept payments from customers. The first is the traditional cash register and credit card [...]

When I blogged about mobile payments last week, I brought up the concept of a mobile wallet. Mobile wallets are the future of retail payments, but you wont get to use one any time soon! Why mobile wallets? The idea behind a mobile wallet is that a customer will pay for their purchase at the [...]

Mobile payments seem to be the talk of the processing and tech industries these days. Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, a million startup companies, and just about every major player in anything related to payment processing, is working on some sort of mobile payment mechanism. So what exactly is a mobile payment? The term mobile payment is [...]

Paypal has long withstood scores of competitors, trying their hand at dethroning the king of online payments. It seems like every time a new payment service pops up, someone, myself included, once again brings up the end of Paypal question. Just a few months ago, MasterCard announced they would open up their API’s to developers. [...]

I have been so busy the past few weeks that I didn’t notice that the merchant account blog’s 5 year anniversary just passed, July 27th. With several hundred posts related to merchant accounts it’s often difficult to find positive and informative topics to write about. However, with major changes in regulation, mobile, contact-less and alternative [...]

We’ve compiled a time-line history of credit card terminals in the US. So far we’ve added most terminals from major manufacturers over the past 30 years, and more will be added as we figure out when they were released. It’s quite difficult to get information on the release of many terminals as most manufacturers don’t [...]

PCI-DSS has been around for several years now, and ignorance is less tolerated when it comes to data security. In case you are just learning about PCI, here’s the 1 minute breakdown on PCI compliance. PCI is a security framework created to help prevent/curb the loss of credit card data. It covers some of the [...]

In the US, there are 2 credit card equipment manufacturers that basically own the entire terminal market, Verifone and Hypercom. Lipman USA is another major player however, Verifone purchased Lipman several years ago effectively creating 2 major brands. Another major company Ingenico, has a larger global presence, but their usage in the US in minimal [...]