Does your business accept MasterCard credit cards? If not, read this article, to find out the advantages of accepting MasterCard. We also offer tips on accepting MasterCard credit cards and how to accept MasterCard through PayPal services.

Have you ever wondered if you're losing customers by not accepting credit cards or a wide enough range of credit cards on your e-commerce website? How do merchants become able to accept MasterCard payments? Read this article to find out more.

About MasterCard

MasterCard, a multinational corporation with headquarters in Purchase, New York, is the consistent second runner in the quest for credit card market share dominance, trailing Visa. According to the Nilson Report, MasterCard is growing—it moved from 30.2% of the market share in 2004 to 36% in 2008, but staying about 10% behind Visa. MasterCard was the first credit card company to offer a payment card in the People's Republic of China, and was connected to EuroCard and now to Europay.

MasterCard runs its business by licensing the MasterCard brand to banks, which issue co-branded cards to consumers and commercial enterprises. From these cards, MasterCard receives both licensing and transaction fees. MasterCard processes about 21 billion transactions per year.

Advantages of Accepting MasterCard

In the fourth quarter of 2006, a study showed that the average customer spend 16% more using MasterCard than they did when paying by check. In addition to this specific benefit of using MasterCard, accepting this card can also streamline your checkout, save time spent handling transactions, increase the safety of transactions, and provide flexible payment options for customers, who may not wish to use cash or checks. MasterCard offers a variety of options including their credit card line; MasterCard Electronic™, which processes electronic transactions; MasterCard PayPass™, which is even faster than credit cards; and Maestro®, which is an online system for accepting customers' ATM cards for transactions.

Steps to Accept MasterCard

There are different ways to be able to accept MasterCard. These include setting up a merchant account yourself and participating in a pre-set merchant account, such as the one offered by PayPal. To obtain a merchant account, you sign up for MasterCard's Referral Program in order to obtain a list of financial institutions and third parties called member service provicers that can provide merchant services, called acquirers and MSP's respectively. You make your choice from the list  you're presented, and set up your merchant account with your chosen acquirer or MSP.

With PayPal, you can set up a Standard or Pro Website Payments  processing service to be able to accept MasterCard. There are a couple of key differences between the two levels of service. Standard service requires your customers to leave your site for a brief excursion to a secure PayPal page, on which they fill in financial information, before returning to your site. This service does not incur a monthly fee, but there is a percentage fee for each transaction, plus a small flat fee. The Pro service enables card processing right on your site, and does charge a monthly fee, in addition to a percentage fee for each transaction and a small flat fee for each transaction as well.

Sources

PayPal paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/general/PaymentSolutions-outside

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