Trying to choose the best credit card processing company can be overwhelming. This is especially true when you are a new small business owner who has never even heard of a “merchant account” before — but the truth is that even seasoned CEOs can get dizzy while researching the payment processing industry. (Trust us, we’ve spoken to them.) There are so many processing companies, they all seem to be doing more or less the same thing, and they all have both glowing testimonials and terrible complaints. How are you supposed to choose the best company under these circumstances? Who can you trust?
We get it. We’ve been reviewing credit card processing companies for years. We hear from dozens of small business owners every day all trying to answer the same question: “Which merchant services solution is the best of my business?” And our answer is always the same: “It depends.”
There is no simple answer to this question. But over the years we’ve found that there are some good guidelines to follow, and by using these guidelines we’ve created this short list of the best small business credit card processing companies, whittling down the field of providers to a manageable number. Some of these payment processors are good for ecommerce via your website, others for mobile payments on your smartphone, others for retail with a credit card machine, for phone order with a virtual terminal, for large transactions, for iPad POS, for high-risk businesses. (I told you, it depends.) But all of them follow some simple rules that we live by, which we’ll discuss in detail below.
