Accept Credit Cards

Free Merchant Accounts- Finding free merchant accounts that are good is hard. Best Internet Merchant Account only recommends two free merchant accounts and those are for a small group of our readers. Read our free merchant accounts review for more info.

It has been well established on Best Internet Merchant Account that the only way you can accept credit cards is to have a merchant account.  We understand that times are tough and some people don’t want to pay for merchant accounts, so they resort to free merchant accounts.  Free merchant accounts aren’t free in the long run.  Yes, you read that right, free merchant accounts are free.  If they were 100% free how would the company running the merchant accounts make money?  They wouldn’t.  Just like free web hosting, the host makes money on placing third party advertisements on your website.  Free merchant accounts don’t place advertisements on your site, but instead charge you transaction fees on every transaction that is processed.  Free merchant accounts don’t charge any up front fees so that is attractive to some people.  But those transaction fees are higher than the cheap merchant accounts.

Set aside the higher merchant account fees, there are some advantages to using a free merchant account.  To start with there are typically no contracts or monthly minimum fees that you have.  As a result of this, you could in theory use a free merchant account for one transaction and then cancel it.  Perhaps the best feature of free merchant accounts is that there are no upfront costs. As we stated earlier this is very attractive to some people but consider this a false pretense.  

While it may sound like Best Internet Merchant Account doesn’t like free merchant accounts that is not true.  In fact, we have a family member who does very a small amount of credit card transactions on a day spa review site that it doesn’t make sense for them to have a normal merchant account.  As Best Internet Merchant Account mentioned in the opening paragraph there are only two free merchant accounts that we would recommend.  Those free merchant accounts are PayPal and Google Checkout.  Here is some brief information on each of those free merchant accounts.

PayPal Merchant Accounts

PayPal is the biggest free merchant account.  PayPal has plans for both personal and businesses. There are no setup fees, no gateway fees, and their transaction fees range 1.9% to 2.9% per transaction depending on the amount of money you process each month.  What is nice about PayPal is there no fee for your clients to pay to use the service.  

Google Checkout

Very similar to PayPal but run through a Google merchant account program.  The transaction fees range in value the same as PayPal does.  Perhaps one of the things that makes the Google Checkout more attractive to some people over PayPal is the fact that Google has their name on it.  Google is very reliable and has some very secure functions.  This being one of the them.

One thing that Best Internet Merchant Account didn’t mention is both PayPal and Google Checkout make it very easy for you to accept credit cards with their easy to install banners.  They both also offer the ability for you to send invoices to your customers.

With every thing being said in this free merchant account review, you need to make the decision on just how many credit card transactions you are going to process and do you want some of the added features that cheap merchant accounts offer you.  We recommend that if you are accepting even as few as a five credit card payments a month that you use a cheap merchant account provider like Merchant Warehouse.  You will get lot more for more your money and the fees won’t be much more.

Merchant Warehouse

Merchant W.H.

Charge.com

MerchantExpress