As an expert in the payment technology industry, I can confidently say that PayPal and merchant accounts both have their pros and cons. Let’s start with PayPal.

PayPal is a popular payment processor that allows businesses and individuals to send and receive payments online. One of the biggest advantages of using PayPal is that it’s easy to set up and use. With just a few clicks, you can start accepting payments from customers all over the world.

Another advantage of using PayPal is that it’s widely recognized and accepted by consumers. This means that customers are more likely to trust and use PayPal to make purchases, which can ultimately lead to increased sales for your business.

However, there are also some disadvantages to using PayPal. For one, PayPal charges fees for each transaction, which can add up over time. Additionally, PayPal has been known to freeze accounts or withhold funds for various reasons, which can be frustrating for businesses that rely on those funds to operate.

Now, let’s talk about merchant accounts. A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments from customers using credit and debit cards. One of the biggest advantages of using a merchant account is that it gives businesses more control over the payment process.

With a merchant account, businesses can choose which payment processor to use and negotiate lower transaction fees. Additionally, businesses can access their funds more quickly than they would with PayPal, which can be important for cash flow management.

However, setting up and maintaining a merchant account can be more complex than using PayPal. Businesses will need to work with a bank or payment processor to set up the account and ensure that it meets all regulatory requirements. Additionally, businesses will need to be vigilant about fraud prevention, as they will be responsible for any fraudulent transactions that occur.

In conclusion, both PayPal and merchant accounts have their advantages and disadvantages. As a business owner, it’s important to evaluate your specific needs and weigh the pros and cons of each option before making a decision. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to accept payments online, PayPal may be the best choice for you. However, if you want more control over the payment process and are willing to put in the time and effort to set up and maintain a merchant account, it may be the better option.

Video Transcription

Yo, what’s up everybody? It’s Justin Live from B2B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment System, hosted by this guy, the John Elway of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman, and we’ll be providing you educational information about FinTech. Small business payment processing and the technology businesses are using in the world today.

And in today’s podcast, we’re going against the age old question, PayPal versus a merchant account. What’s the difference? Is PayPal a merchant account? What are your limitations? There’s just a lot of difference differences between PayPal. And a traditional merchant account.

And Alan, being the expert that he is himself thought it’d be a good time to explain the differences, the benefits of having a merchant account, the pros and cons and all the stuff in between. Yeah, man. What’s new? We did see an interesting video where a guy was talking about this and we thought it was a good topic.

Oh yeah, no, what’s new in the world. We’re looking at a lot of new rules that Visa is rolling out, so merchants might be confused about that. We’ll have another podcast on that. Other than that, feeling better from being sick, so that’s much better. I’m not coughing as much, driving everybody crazy and We had a lot of rain here still.

Yeah. I’m a little, I’m not too happy. I don’t see like the state and the county responding to that very well. Yeah. My sewer’s still full to the top, so if we have any rain, we’re gonna be flooded. Yeah, it’s crazy. I saw a video that Dave took. Going down one of the streets near his house and you just see like outside everybody’s drywall.

All their furniture. Yep. All piled up down the whole side of the road for like miles. Yeah, it was, it’s crazy. It was like that last week for us. They were doing special pickup all week and they just didn’t re I mean it makes sense cuz that’s not healthy to, all that mold and whatever.

Yeah, they did. They got rid of that real quick. I wish they could have did that the same way they got rid of the water, but I don’t know. Here, whatever they do something about that. We always get the question like, oh, PayPal, what’s the difference between PayPal and having a merchant account and is pay?

The question always comes up, is PayPal a payment processor or what is PayPal? So the explanation is PayPal is the technical term. We call them as a pay F, or another technical term would be a third party aggregator. But in essence, to understand really what PayPal is PayPal is the merchant. So when you use PayPal, they’re the actual merchant and you, they’re allowing you to be a sub merchant in their system.

So you don’t have they might give you a number, but you don’t really have a merchant account and Okay. You don’t have a merchant account. They’re the merchant of records, so they make all the rules. What does that mean? When people get billed, they get billed and it says PayPal, Justin’s t-shirt shop doesn’t say Justin’s t-shirt shop, right?

It has always has PayPal neck. Do it got it. Other companies who are similar to them are Stripe Square Toast is a payback. Also. Whenever you go to a restaurant that has toast, it always says tst. Okay. When you go to a store and they’re using Square, it’ll always say sq. Etsy is a pay F, so if you sell your products on Etsy, Or you sell products and you have a Shopify website and you use Shopify payments, those are all pay faxs.

So it’s always, it always says Shopify right next to the, it says shop now. They call it shop. It says Shop next to the transaction. So those are all pay FFAs. One of the things that God mentioned in the video is that, oh, Google. PayPal, shut down my business. Square, shut down my business.

This place shut down my business, right? Yep. Most of that, you know it. Like most of that is caused by that. People don’t understand some of the rules that PayPal has or these platforms. Yo, side note, yes. Having glasses is a pain in the ass. Sorry, man. Always. Smudged and Yeah, I know it’s always cleaning my doors.

Disaster. They, they they have rules and Justin was in the room, we had a meeting with some guys and we’re talking about, you have to be, you get, you sign up for PayPal, you have to be honest with them about what, or any of these services.

You have to be honest with them about what you sell. So I’ve seen many merchants, they’ll make a C website on Shopify and then they’ll apply for the payments part, and then they go to find out Shopify won’t process payments for cbd and then they have to go there. They are now. They orna.

Maybe un They don’t accept it. Yeah, they do. They do cookies. The cb, like the huge cannabis brand. Yeah. Their website is through. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s Shopify payments. Oh, I, yeah, it’s a Shopify website, they’ve, they’ll let you have the website, but they won’t process the payments. Okay.

Yeah. So you gotta add, you gotta bolt on a payment processor and a gateway, whereas, yeah. Had to be clear, man, cuz you know what you’re saying. No, I’m saying like, they don’t process the payments for that industry. So when you go to use one of these services, you need to make sure what’s in their terms of service, just because to let you use the.

They’ll let you use the platform, right? Doesn’t necessarily mean that because they let you use the platform doesn’t mean that they’re gonna allow you to process payments on it, right? So people sign up, sometimes they sign up for Stripe, and then Stripe says, oh, sorry, we don’t process payments for that.

So some of the things that are restricted are like adult content they don’t like. Yeah. Before you get in that. Yeah. Real quick. Just for right. Poops and giggles. Explain PayPal again. Okay, so PayPal, the difference bet between, so PayPal basic is like a middle man, right? No. PayPal is they’re basically a big, giant merchant.

That’s what they are. Okay. And then they can, because they have that status of being a pay ffa. Or a third party. What’s a pay f? A third party aggregator. So they’re allowed to have, they’re allowed to have mer, they’re allowed to be a merchant. And then let other merchants be under them. Okay.

So that’s how all these other companies operate and other companies like that are Stripes, square Toast, Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, even, because some people have an Amazon store. And then how do people pay through? They, a lot of times it’s Amazon payments. And so the, one of the main things is, when you sign up to these companies, it’s their way or the highway, right?

Pretty much it’s their way or they make the rules and that’s that, and that’s it. And a lot of times they don’t answer, they don’t have a phone to answer. It’s all done through. Most of those companies communicate via email, right? Maybe chat if you’re lucky. If you get big enough, maybe they’ll talk to you on the phone.

But in most cases, everything’s done through an email. Absolutely. So it’s important that you read the terms of service. Yeah. Make sure that you know what you’re signing up for, that if you can sell the product that you have, et cetera, et cetera. Make sure what you’re dealing with.

Like the Shopify, they’ll let people build the website even for something like ammo. Guns, weapons. Firearms, right? And then the person will apply for the payments portion and they’ll be like, sorry, we can’t process your payments. So then you have to go you have to go out and get a merchant processor and a gateway.

And there’s a few gateways that link on to Shopify. And the same thing like for eBay. PayPal is not the only solution you can get. You can use a merchant account with authorized net and link that into your eBay store. The thing is a lot of times I, we will see merchants that have, they know that a certain, demographic of people like to use PayPal.

So they’ll have it all, when you go to a website to check out, you’ll see multiple ways to check out, so you know that Highly edibles. Yeah. They rebuilt their website on w WordPress without my help. Okay. They installed Square. Okay. Ran it for two weeks and they just got shut down.

They said they, they’re the only explanation they give them. They didn’t follow their product guidelines to have specific, CBD has specific product guidelines and we’ve talked about in that in some other podcasts, about having your cos for every single product showing the product labels.

Everything has to be all the COAs, which is the certificate that shows the test. So people know what that is and it might not know. That’s the test that shows that it’s 0.3 or 0.03 or less. Thc, all of those have to be on the website and they have to be less than 12 months old.

And I’ve heard even about some cl some, I’ve had some merchants contact me recently. They said, oh, I’ve was processing on Square for two years and now they told me I’m violating the terms of service. And I go, look at their website. No product labels. No cos and I’m, and I tell ’em that and they’re like, wow, they didn’t even tell us.

And people need to understand like the, compliance is important because you have that, especially cbd. We’ve talked about it. Almost every three letter agency in the United States is looking at that, looking at that business. Yep. And that’s, that’s what makes it crazy.

But you want to make sure The guy in the video we were watching, he was talking about, oh, I was selling classes. PayPal didn’t like it. I was selling digital downloads. PayPal didn’t like it. I forget. And then he was selling also some physical goods with he does, he was doing reselling, right?

Yeah. Used products, but they didn’t really mind. That was more the other stuff. From what he was talking about. Yeah. He was doing some other consulting. I think he just said he did. I don’t know. He had a lot of businesses. And that’s the other thing. You don’t want to just have one account and then have a whole bunch of different businesses.

And attached to that one, attached to that one account. You want to have an account for each business type that you have. And a lot of people don’t understand that. And the other thing is. You have to make sure you’re like, you can’t tell PayPal or a merchant processor because I’ve seen a numerous amount of people get in trouble for this.

They get one merchant account, then they attach that merchant account onto multiple URLs Stores. Yeah, multiple websites. You can get away with that for a while. But this, but as soon as you start to get some charge bags, what’s gonna happen? Yeah. Or you start really making some money. Then they’re gonna go look and they’re gonna say, Hey we approve this guy for this domain, nbc.com, but now the guy’s processing on xyz.com, it’s a completely different product and we didn’t approve that website.

Now they’re taking your money. They’re holding, we’re not taking it. They’re holding it. Yeah. They hold your money for up to 180 days from the last action. Yep. That’s something you gotta, you’ve gotta be aware of. You can’t. Ha. You also can’t have multiple, if you want to have, let’s say you need to have multiple merchant accounts, cuz maybe your product is a little risky and you need to have two or three merchant accounts for your website, so that’s easy.

You can what scenario would cause you to have two or three merchant accounts on a website? Let’s say you were doing something like fulfillment ha using fulfillment houses. Okay? And you’re brand new in business. Maybe you’re a youngster and you’re not re you, you’re not gonna get, you’re not organized enough to get approved for a couple hundred grand.

And that’s one thing that I talked to young people about all the time. I go, what do you mean you don’t have QuickBooks or Zero or fresh books or something like that? You need to have. You need to use some kind of, when you want to grow your business and scale it, you need to be ready. There’s gotta be some sort of paper trail, right?

There’s gotta be a pa. You gotta have organized financials and a bank account. The bank doesn’t want to see, you send over a bank statement with 50 bucks and you’re processing 50 grand. They want to see you have money that to run your business, and they want to see in that particular business he’s talking about, they’ll never be able to show that because there’s never that much money.

They have money, but they’re just, it’s not organized correctly. Yeah. But if it was organized correctly, they would be able to produce a financial statement and it would show the cash flow and what the profit was. Even though the profit margin is 20, 25%, still a decent profit. Morgan. Restaurants make lucky if you clean in a restaurant 10 or 15%.

That’s true. So you know, when you put it like that, it’s not that bad. I’m not, I guess I’m. The, that whole business model is just a force man. It’s just a lot to it, and I don’t Good luck to those guys. Yeah without get, no, but I’m just saying, let’s say you have a mer, I have other clients.

Let’s say you have a merchant account, let’s say for 250,000, but maybe it’s a SAS business. And the bank doesn’t want to give you more, you have to go get a different, a second merchant account. So there are softwares you can do use that do load balancing. And you said part of your traffic to one merchant account, part of your traffic to another merchant account.

That makes sense when you, so you know, and then those guys in weren’t using load balancing and they were going in changing everything manually. Every couple of days. And that doesn’t look good because you, you don’t want to have uneven sales where, oh, there’s 10 sales one day, no sales, 20 sales, no sales for a week.

Then there’s 10 sales. You don’t want to have that. You wanna show, even that’s why you need to use software that allows for load balancing. You have to understand. You have to know what’s, you’re going to be under a microscope when you’re not stocking the, when you don’t own the product.

Or you’re not stocking the product and you’re, I saw like 2008, 2009 and then the growth of the internet, back in those years, we erased an entire system out of the commerce in America of, distributors. What is that? People distributed a product.

Okay. Like it used to be like the manufacturer sold to a distributor and the distributor. Oh yeah. That way the, yeah. Sold to the stores or sold to the end users. The warehouse guys. The warehouse guys. The guys who were warehousing the product and they were the ones, for going out and delivering.

And what happened to those guys disappeared because the, e-commerce started to hit dig and companies said, Hey, why do we have to do that? Because people realized that they were getting jerked around as well, cuz they could buy the product direct. Yeah. Once e-commerce launched, And companies started to sell direct.

We, you didn’t need these distributors anymore. Hence the reason why there’s not a JC Penney’s, Boston store, et cetera, et cetera, et Look at Bed Bath and Beyond. They’re going outta business now. They tried to reorganize. They’re gonna close all their stores up. They own some, a couple of other brands.

They’re all clo. They’re all gonna close up, done. Because they said they made a big mistake when the internet started. They didn’t get on the internet fast enough. They didn’t think about they didn’t. And Amazon overtook them. Yeah. Because they, they thought that people wanted to always come in with the blue postcard.

20% on. Yeah. They thought that, people were gonna go shopping and then Covid came and then they realized every, all those bus, there’s a bunch of businesses like Bed Bath and Beyond that are done. Yeah. Look at toys are us also. They, that was before Covid, but that’s also the huge mis, whoever was their ceo definitely was No, you just terrible job.

Yeah. You saw a lot of companies where they were so big and had all these locations and they basically, missed the internet. They just said, oh, we don’t need that. We don’t need to have a comprehensive website. Toys Us is opened back up, but yeah, but it’s new. It’s like inside of. M Macy’s and Boston.

But it’s stores. But its same. It’s not that part. Their own food. No they’re making a relaunch this year though. I guess they’re having a, that and what was the other big one? KB toy stories are coming back to. Yeah. That’s good because toys for me cuz I’m a dad with, I got grandkids now, so I’m a grandpa, but, I, me being an eighties baby, I want to, I’m still a product of the, I want to go touch this stuff.

Like for clothes, for instance, for me is really difficult. Yeah. Clothes blows my mind because I want I want a soft material. Yeah. And so before I, I mean it’s easy to, like after you put on an organic a hundred percent organic cotton t-shirt, I don’t need to try it on again. But if it’s a different brand, I don’t know how the shirt fits.

So it’s crazy to me that, shopping is so popular online. Especially obvious for women. It’s. More popular. But it’s funny, when I go to like to Costco, you’ll see they have 20 times the amount of women’s clothing to men’s clothing. Oh yeah. Everywhere. Yeah. It’s crazy how much, how that is.

So let’s get back to the whole PayPal thing. So the o other thing with PayPal is, since they’re the merchant, there’s, the other thing is your data, right? And I can’t tell you, so I think you skipped, did we talk about the types of businesses that PayPal doesn’t like? Oh. So let’s finish that. They don’t like adult content, firearms, weapons, gambling, multi-level marketing.

Although I would say that if somebody was big, they. They could, they’re doing millions of dollars a month. They’re definitely using PayPal. PayPal will definitely, they have a partnership with those types of guys. Pay PayPal will definitely partner with them. Yeah. Because they want them to sell the stuff on eBay and they’ll partner with them and they want them to use PayPal for all their ClickFunnel pages and all that other happy ownership.

They but it has to be big enough. And they also want the kind, they like the ones where the actual company is fulfilling the product and not the individual salespeople. Fulfilling the product. So as long as you meet the guidelines, they’ll do like digital downloads, digital products, streaming products.

They don’t like that. They don’t like anything to do with tobacco, smoke shops, cbd, cigars, none of that. Nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, they don’t like any of that stuff. Yeah. So if you have any of those businesses, which pretty much eliminates almost like 70% of web e-commerce websites. What else do they got?

Clothes and, home goods, but rest of this. Yeah, man. So you really need to think about getting a merchant account if you have one of those types of businesses. Yeah, if you have those kind of businesses, that’s where you need, that’s where merchant accounts come in. PayPal has a lot of good features, but other gateways offer the same thing.

Virtual terminals, send out payment links, send out invoices, text payments, email payments. PayPal has been like the web design, go-to, digital marketing, freelance, payment platform. I ran my business on PayPal for ever, they’ve been very uneven with dealing with businesses also, like coaching businesses, any kinda like service businesses.

They’ve been very uneven with those companies. And what do you mean by that? Being that they’ll contact them and ask ’em to send in bank statements and stuff like that. Oh yeah. They did that to me all the time. Yeah. And they want to make sure that people have money. They’re not dealing with people that are broke.

Yeah. PayPal is definitely a weird it’s little company, man. And the other thing is, I, real quick I hated it actually. Like I’ve just, having my money going through PayPal was a disaster a lot of times because we’ve had this conversation before. You get a one month, you might make 20 grand as a web freelancer, right?

Next month, a thousand bucks. You know what I mean? And when you have a couple of those months, one of those months, PayPal might be like we’re not gonna give you this money yet. You’re gonna have to wait. Yeah. And they’re famous for their 21 day hold. Oh my God. That’s what I’m talking about. The 21 day hold.

There’s pretty much anything over five grand. I think it was, I don’t know, for me anyway, if there was a, if I got a big web project or something I, that’s I ended up just stopping it and then using my bank and I’ll tell you, which was more expensive, but, Easier to get my money in a sense.

For some transactions, I use them both. Like for maintenance, like for retainment or like monthly retainers for clients. Yeah. Because you can set, set up as, set it and forget it with PayPal too. You just put it organ, whatever. I had a process to where I would remember to set out the PayPal link every month, but yeah. But for, having a merchant account through your bank isn’t always the best thing either. You got, yeah. The bank is not necessarily your friend when it comes to merchant services. No, they don’t know about merchant services. They’re good for a basic setup. You have a basic retail store or something like that.

Beyond that, they might not be able to get you what you need. Yeah, I didn’t really the invoicing was an add-on. Do the bank. So that was more money, yeah, no, it was a lot of eglin. Yeah. Recently there’s also been some issues with PayPal where people send each other money like peer to peer, his friends and family.

So one, some, a guy that I know him and his friends went to go to the Final Four. And he paid for all the tickets and the hotel and all that. Yeah. And then when his friends paid him back, One guy sent the money through PayPal. And it was about eight, 9,000 bucks. And PayPal still hasn’t given him the money.

He’s terrible. And he had his friend write a letter saying, yeah, I’m paying my friend back for, tickets that he bought and the hotel, and the plane ticket and the da. And they’re going back and forth with all that man. Give PayPal, get at man his money, man. That, that comes with the scrutiny that’s come down from the federal government.

Yeah, what the, so let’s talk about that real quick. What the $600? No, what the Fed Now thing. Oh, the Fed Now just a little. So that’s just a small glimpse of how the Fed Now rules are gonna take place. So every time you send money, doesn’t matter what platform it is. It’s gonna go through Fed Now first.

That’s not true. So you don’t know. I’m just telling you right now, the Fed Now system that they’re talking about, first of all, they’re looking for companies to integrate to it. Nobody’s in a hurry to integrate to this system because at that point the federal government’s gonna know all your business.

So a lot of that’s my people are not real quick, man. So listen man, the Fed now before you make a transaction, it’s gonna go through the Fed Now network. That’s how they want it to be, right? That’s what they call, and then it’ll go to, for instance, Jay’s car wash, right? Like I You got your car wash at your car wash at my business.

If the feds, they’re like, nah, I don’t like Jay’s car wash, man, you should have went to Allen’s car wash. They can stop that payment. It’s not just that they’re gonna see oh, this guy went into this, into outdoor world. Did he buy ammo? Did he buy a gun? Did he buy, what did he buy? That’s a good, that’s a good thing.

I’m just saying that. I’m just saying overall it’s too much Big brother. A super big brother, do you want them knowing you want, this is the new world order? Do you want ’em to know like they, you went and bought some viagras or whatever it is. Not that they don’t already know that, but I’m just saying I’m just giving a for instance, like they’re gonna know every purchase you made.

They’re talking about oh, there’s people that are against electric cars now because electric car, they can shut it off from outside. What did you think they were? Come on man. You think that’s new technology? No, but I’m just saying I don’t want people, you guys gotta start. You gotta wake up and stop listening into all that Channel 4, 7, 12 news channel, man.

Get your news from somewhere else because geez, they’ve been able to shut down cars for, but what? A couple of years now at least five years. You have a computer in your car. What stops? You don’t make your payment. The Honda. Oh yeah, the OnStar thing. How old is OnStar? Oh, that’s around for over a decade.

That’s my point. Yeah. Come on ladies and gentlemen. It’s crazy. Like the technology always been there. They just didn’t turn it on. Let’s just put it this way. If the government’s controlling it all, it’s a problem. So now let’s get into let’s just talk about one last thing, which is about data.

One of the things is when you use a third party company like PayPal, they own the data. Explain that. Okay. What? What is the data that they own? Okay. All your customers, they have all your customer data. They know what they bought from you, how much they spent, how often they have their email address.

They have their credit card number, they have their phone number. You have no ACC access. If they cut you off, boom, all your data is gone. If you’re not doing, I would do quarterly exports. And also I’d be, if I was using there for my invoicing. Yeah. I would always download like all of my data. Yeah. But like the credit card date is all encrypted, so you can’t see it Anyway.

So I’ll give you an example. I know a guy who was using Square and he was doing a sa, he had a SAS company. One Day Square decided, oh, we don’t like this SAS company anymore. Boom. They pull, they shut him off. He can’t bill anybody and he has no. He has no his, he can’t even get in touch with the customers because he had limited information on them.

He had email addresses, but that’s it. No credit card data. Can’t run the credit cards. That’s why like when companies are doing that, I talk to them and I go, listen, is time, you can’t, you get to be. Not be so cheap. That’s the, that’s key. You need to be using a third party gateway. That way all the stuff is on the gateway.

The processor, even if the processor cuts you off, you still have access to the gateway. You could direct it to a new merchant account, direct it to a new service. Or you use something like, there’s companies, one of ’em is called Charge B, and there’s a few other ones where it’s a subscription type of software.

And then they link into the gateway. And then that way also, let’s say you have to, you need more than one merchant processor. They can facilitate that, and you have a, when you have a big sask, this guy’s went complete. They went out of business. That’s terrible. They’re done.

One day, they’re in business doing 2 million a month, and the next day they’re done. And then to get a new merchant account, then they’re emailing all the people. People didn’t rein, not everybody didn’t get a hundred percent like re-enrollment. Oh, I’m sure. But they were, dead in the water for months to get back to, even the decent amount of, so yeah, man.

So those, excuse me. So those, these companies like PayPal, Stripe, square, whatever they own, It’s their way or the highway man. Yeah. But it’s their merchant account, not yours. It’s theirs and not yours. You just have some, a small piece of access to it. So as a business owner myself, I would highly su you know, like I want control over everything.

I don’t want, you to be able to shut on or turn off anything. In my business. Exactly. It’s important for you to have that control that gives you peace of mind, payPal. It is just a, another big corporation. They don’t care about your little small business. Your record shop where your, whatever it is, your toy stop shop, your furniture repair store.

They don’t care man. They care about processing payments and that’s it. So when it comes to that type of peace of mind, this is where a merchant account comes in play. So let’s talk about, the merchant account. So with the merchant account, You get a merchant, you get a merchant number, which is like an bank account number, right?

And it is a bank account because it’s F D I C insured. Basically the money goes into that account. So like a merchant, like when, I think when I first started with Nationwide Payment Systems of course I understood, what a merchant account was and all this other stuff, but I didn’t understand the difference between I guess I did understand the difference between PayPal and my bank.

But I didn’t know there was more. You know what? I didn’t know. There was all these tons of options for, payment processing. There’s tons of options and people yeah. You get a merchant number. You have to be transparent about what you sell, what you are. Like. We have a guy who’s 10 URLs.

It has one merchant account, but the bank knows what all the 10 websites are, right? They’ll sell the same thing, it’s just 10 of ’em, right? For marketing purposes and then smart. And then we have, unique way how to do billing for that. So that E, so that everybody’s build with the unique descriptor based on the site they were on.

And that’s important. You have to, and then when somebody needs something like that, not every bank. One wants to do it or has the capability to do it, or even the knowledge, they don’t even know what to do probably. They don’t even have it in their setup. So you have to know oh, I we had a guy that needed that and he came to us and he is oh, you guys can do that.

And we’re like, yeah, we can do it. And then, we went and did it. So that’s the whole thing is people don’t know when they, they know they need something. And then they go, wow, if I would’ve had this, I could have been growing my business much at a much better clip. I said that as, as well when I, building websites and, doing, helping small businesses for the past decade.

Yeah, I really wish I could have partnered with someone like Alan for the residual income off of what that business was gonna do by me referring a merchant. Account provider. Yeah, it’s funny. Like nationwide payment system. But it’s funny, we talked that’s out there, ladies and gentlemen, to make some commission or some side money on all the projects that you’re, you’re helping these small businesses, launch their business from the ground to, opening their doors for, in some cases literally.

So why not have a peace. Of, that money, it’s tough out here, in the economy. So there’s all these different ways that small businesses can especially freelancers can add on to their list of services and like I was, I had, the merchant account services, adding that to your tool belt as an upsell, it’s another one of those things.

Yeah. And you can help your merchants because a lot of times like. Businesses want to have a loyalty program, they want to have different things. And that’s where we come in, where we can go talk to them and find out, oh, what do you need? How do you want to sell? What are you gonna do gift cards? What are all the services that you need in your business?

And then we help them, build a tech stack. And we look at what we have in our little bag of tricks and we go, because there’s always new software coming out. Like the other day, a guy in the office. And they’re showing me all this new stuff that they did at their company and I was like, wow, yeah, we gotta start selling that because, one of the things we see is there’s a lot of a lot going on in the point with point of sale right now, right?

So people like Clover but they don’t like the price tag anymore. Cuz like Clover, it’s all made in China. So it used to be a few years ago, I could get a station for around 1200. Now a clover. So how come you can’t make that 2,500? Why can’t you make that same station in America? I don’t know what, they don’t make it in America.

It’s all made overseas. I’m saying why I wasn’t, why isn’t a company? I don’t know. None of it. Is it expensive? How is it expensive? Apparently we don’t make the chips here we know we can’t make we don’t have the, what is it, cobalt. Yeah, whatever it is. We don’t have the stuff to make the chip.

Something like that. I don’t know. We have it, but they don’t want to go dig it up because a lot of it is on, we don’t have enough of it. We don’t have enough of it, so it doesn’t make sense to go digging for it. Good for America. That makes sense. Don’t need to go digging for something that’s not gonna they still could get the raw material. Bring in here. And then make it here. But for some reason, yeah, I don’t get that. I don’t get, we don’t have any of this electronic, that’s why like during Covid, you couldn’t get a tv, not just that, couldn’t get a car. Like I was looking at a car, I was looking at a chart the other day that showed new car manufacturing.

So a few years ago, new car manufacturing was like between seven and 10 million. During the years of Covid, they only produced three to 4 million cars. That’s like half. That’s a lot. That’s a lot less. Yeah, a lot less. And that included the electric cards, which was under a million CARSs. All right, so with the merch account, you get your merchant number similar to your checking or routing number, right?

Yeah. It’s your account number. It’s your account number, what else? You get your, and then you can, then you gotta design what you want. What are you doing? Is it e-commerce? You need a virtual terminal? Do you need invoicing? What kinds of goods and services? A lot of people now want to do this omnichannel, omni commerce, full commerce, whatever you want.

They need ev, they want everything. They want to sell mobile, they want to sell online, they want to sell in their store, they want to create pop-up stores. So when someone tells us what they want to do, that’s when we go into the bag and we go, okay, here’s a product that will do all of that for you.

And then that’s, and then you do that. So you know, there’s. So like those products a few years ago weren’t really around, but now there’s more and more of them coming out. Like we just saw a new one the other day and it’s gonna be, it’s less than half the price of clover, plus there’s no apps to buy.

So on a monthly basis it’s much less and it’s more economical. And cuz we had a merchant the other day, they broke a clover. I told the guy, I said, Hey man, I want to show you this new system. Because the guy’s complaining about the price of the clover. I said, I can’t change the price of the clover, but if you want to switch to something else, then we can get you this other product.

Less expensive. Also very reliable from a good company. Good customer service. Is it pretty? Is it pretty? Yeah, it looks pretty. It looks nice. It’s got everything that, it’s got everything that you need. It’ll do. Has the customer facing screen where people can pay and it’s just not clover.

Just not clover. Slap a clover sticker on it. We’ll call it the anti clover. We’re looking at another product where you can take a WordPress website, right? Add a plug into it, and then that sucks everything off into another program that you can put. Basically, you put an app on a tablet.

And then turns your whole website into your point of sale system. Yeah. But you the one thing that I have about this is you still need a cash register? No. You just need a screen. So you need a screen and a money drawer. A credit, a cash drawer. And a credit card machine. No, you don’t need any, you don’t need a, we’re, I don’t know if you need a printer or not.

We’re working on seeing whether or not we can eliminate the printer and print from the credit card machine. To eliminate the printer and then you for a receipt. For a receipt, and then you need a scanner. And so something like that is going to be, I think, some game changing type of software. We’re hoping to figure we’re working on the payment integration now, and hopefully we get that done in a couple of weeks.

And then we gotta put together the hardware package and test it out on a few client te get a few clients to test it. But it’s gonna definitely be a unique thing cuz now you have your WordPress website with all your inventory linked into your point of sale, and then you could have it on a tablet with another device.

And take that out to a popup market. Or let’s say you go to a trade show and boom, you extended your whole website into your card present point of sale, and even mobile. That’s nice. And then everything is going through the, all your inventories being tracked through your commerce. So that’s pretty interesting.

You have to, you with a merchant account, you have more control over all your data. You can see all your customer data, all your transactions you have control over that. You can talk to customer service on the phone. You can email them, you can, you can actually call somebody and 99% of the time, yeah.

Talk to someone like, Hey I sell C B D. I see Cyclo is real big. What’s your guys’ thoughts on. Are you guys cool without me selling some of that? Yeah, man. Go ahead. Yeah, like anytime people add a new product to their site, they say, oh, send us the product information and we give it to underwriting, get the thumbs up, say, you have somebody to work with, just put something on your website.

Then next thing you know, oh sorry, we gotta shut you off the entire website and you close your merchant account. Yeah, maybe. And you’re holding your, maybe might be holding your, your money, selling your money. Then you could end up on the match list. Don’t even wanna go there. Can’t get a merchant account for six years.

But when you have a merchant account and you’re doing e-commerce, okay, you need a gateway. So it’s two, it’s always two pieces when, it’s like PayPal, stripe Square, where it’s one piece. So like with WordPress is Woo Commerce, right? And then that’s the payment gateway. No, that’s the shopping cart’s.

That’s the shop. There’s really three, depending how you’re going about it. There’s three of ’em, correct. Three steps, but yeah. Yeah. You have your shopping card, your payment gateway, your merchant account, but once it’s all set up, it’s all completely seamless. Seamless. Very. Yeah. It works well together.

Yeah. It’s all seamless and then you’re all done. So PE people get scared. They go, oh, if I use PayPal, it’s one piece. No, it ain’t. They think it is, but it’s not. But it ain’t because they actually have a gateway too. But it’s looks like it’s one piece because it’s the one, one company. So it looks like it’s one piece, but also, other things, with gateways, invoicing, text to pay, email to pay mobile, you can add on mobile processing, ach, eex, recurring transactions.

You just have to be, yet when you, when we get someone with a merchant account, We go through the whole process. How do you want to sell? How are you gonna sell? And then we give up. We design something that’s gonna work for them. There’s also a lot of talk about alternative payments like Fed. Now, how’s that gonna work?

Zelle people, are people gonna use Zelle on their website? Venmo cash app? I don’t really see people using Z on their website because it’s not aggregated. So someone’s gonna, the bank’s gonna get mad. You get 50 zals, you’re gonna get 50 deposits into your bank account. Yeah. I don’t see that happening. And there’s a new Zelle thing, a competition to Zelle coming out, but I read about it and it’s not really a competitor to Zelle.

What it is it’s a competitor to Apple Pay, and then some people are confused about it. I think it’s called pays, P A Z E. I haven’t heard of it. It’s something new that’s coming out. So it’s a bunch of banks. It’s a bunch of the banks that don’t work with Apple Pay are gonna launch that app la launch that.

But it’s go, at first it’s only gonna be for e-commerce and basically it’s your credit card in the, in that app. So you have the app and then you have your credit card from that bank in that app. And then when you’re making a payment online, it’s gonna send you like a code and do a two factor authentication.

It’s cool though. I like it, people are getting a little confused about it saying, oh, it’s Zelle, but it’s not Zelle. It’s your credit card. Like a real credit card? Yeah, it’s your credit card. Let’s say you have a Chase card, they don’t participate in Apple Pay. So I think Chase is one of the comp the banks participating.

So you would get that app, you’d load your Chase card in there. Then when you pay online, If the merchant has that app on their checkout page, okay, I get it. Then you hit that button and then it sends you a little message to the app, and then you have to two factor authentication. What’s your, okay.

Nevermind. But so for me, I’m sorry to cut you off, man. I’m the people who are using their phones to pay. Yeah. It’s starting to, it bugs me a little bit. Yeah. I saw an article in the paper the other day where somebody said, Oh, I was I had my phone in my pocket and I walked by a machine and it charged my phone card.

No, I didn’t. There’s no way that happened where somebody said, oh, my card was in my wallet, and then the machine charged. It’s, there’s no way, because the new credit card machines. Are not equipped like that. They’re equipped with called, what’s called nearfield communication. N ffc Man. Nfc. What?

All I was saying is it’s not faster than me pulling out my card and tapping. No, it’s not faster, because the one lady I was at Whole Foods, she’s oh my, it’s not loading my bank cap’s not loading. We are sitting there for five minutes waiting for, I literally told the lady, I said, listen, turn your wifi off.

And she did that. Yeah. I said, now close it. Refresh ding. And she was able to do it well, like I, I got stuck one. But in the amount of time Yeah. That we were standing there. Yeah. She coulda literally pulled her card out. But she didn’t have that. Yeah. I got stuck one day. I left the office, no wallet, but that’s had no gas.

So that’s the gift and the curse of it. I had no wallet and I needed gas. I pulled into the gas station. Oh, no wallet. Oh, I had my phone. Boo and I did a apple pay. Thank God that apple pay outside at the gas station on the pump, actually. Yeah. That’s interesting. I was pretty happy with that.

Yet Costco has like the tap and pay, you don’t even have to stick your card in, just tap your card on it. Oh man. There’s no way anybody’s card got charged out of their wallet. Where there, especially without the RFI pocket, what are the R ffi D wallets? They don’t even make, first of all, they don’t even make RIF ft chip cards anymore, right?

So I’m pressing the bullshit button, bing. Now, I did see something that’s crazy and I saw the video where the guy proved it. Now, here’s something that you need to be careful about when you go to the ATM machine, right? Or you’re at the gas pump. So when you’re at the gas pump, I’ve seen it on the gas pump where it says, oh, do you want a receipt?

Yes or no? Or, and they, some of the gas pumps say, oh, do you want to do another transaction? You need to make sure you hit no or yes on that receipt thing and end it. Yeah. But on the ATM machine, there was a scam going on where these guys were standing by near ATMs. They would wait for someone to go to the at t m, and then when you’re done at the A T m, you take your money.

The ATM always asks, do you want to do another transaction? Boom. And then these scammers run up to the atm, hit yes. And then take more money outta your bank account. And then some guy said, this bank told him no way that people can do that. So he put a camera over there and he had his and he put a camera and he wa and he filmed it all going down.

Oh, it’s definitely possible. Yeah. So when you go to the atm, hit. No, and end the transaction. Do not drive off if it, if that prompt comes up, the banks need to fix that. Yeah, that’s ridiculous. And the transaction, if you walk away, so you know, and then the other thing with merchant accounts is chargebacks, right?

Oh, so let me just get to this. With merchant account and PayPal things and services like that, once you’re doing 10, 20 grand a month, that’s when you need to start thinking about, Hey, I probably need to get a merchant account. Know, right? Because maybe you’re a small business or it’s a side hustle and you know you want to get with one of those services.

And we have a service like that too, where you can, get started as a small business with a, the pay fact type of service. But then once you get to that 10, 20 grand, then you gotta start thinking about, oh, I need to grow my business. Now’s when I need to get a merchant account so I can scale my business and grow it.

Because I’m gonna tell you something right now. As a business owner, I used PayPal for a really long time. Yes. And when I went to my bank I don’t know what it was I was trying to do. It might have been getting a car, was it my anyway, they did not wanna see my PayPal activity. No. They wanted to see my bank statement.

Luckily, I had the most of the money going directly to the business banking account, but PayPal still was a big chunk of my income. So I almost didn’t get the car because they were going off of Yeah. They you don’t make enough money. Exactly. That’s why you need to have good record keeping.

And set up, QuickBooks set up zero, set up fresh books, something like that. So then that’s when I started transferring my bank, my PayPal funds into my business checking account. Yeah. But I was losing too much money. And the other thing let’s talk about is chargebacks. So when you get a chargeback, those suck and you’re using PayPal, Stripe, square, et cetera.

They’re the merchant. So they can also decide. Oh, we agree with this card holder. And that’s it then. Then you don’t get to fight. Nope. And that’s a problem. So if you have a merchant account, that there’s a charge back, you can fight the charge back and or you can call me on the phone if you were my client and say, Hey, I got this charge back.

How do I fight it? And then we’ll help you fight it. I talk to a guy today, Allen, get these every day. There’s a lot of adult entertainment in South Florida. No. Even we get that a guy with auto repair. There you go. Even different, more back. So someone said that I could see that. I’m just saying this is a, it was explained so for the adult side of it.

So at the strip club, a guy will go into the strip club, get a lap dance, and then say he didn’t get the amount of time. That he was supposed to get. Yeah. Where his wife finds the charge and so he’s charge Justin, did you go here to this place? Yeah, I did. It’s all good. She would’ve went with me, said, no, I didn’t go there.

Yeah. Then your wife does a charge bag and then your wife does a charge bag, says, oh, my husband says he was never there. Never there That’s when Alan steps in and he is yeah, we’re pressing the bullshit button. Ding, ding. We can get video cameras, footage. We got a signature on the the check, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.

Driver’s license. Driver’s license, cuz they gotta scan it at the door, whatever. All the news technology. You’re a poop creek without a paddle buddy. No, but you had, we had a guy today and someone tried to do a charge back in a. Auto repair for $4,500. So I was explaining to the guy came and picked the car up, he ran the transaction.

You gotta take your receipt with the terms and conditions, you gotta blow it up big cuz it’s probably like small letters when you fax it over, they’re just gonna see a big blob of black, there. You gotta type it all up. Say, Hey, this is what’s on here. The guy signed this. There’s a th there’s a, one year warranty.

The guy just needs to bring his car back. He never called us, we don’t know. The car broke down until we got this charge back. So the thing is, when you’re using these services, they can decide, oh, we agree with that person. Whatever. And you have a chargeback, you can’t, those services, they’re not looking, they don’t care.

They’re gonna agree 90% of the time with the card holder every time. And they’re gonna say, oh, you’re doing crappy business. We’re not. You can’t, you’re kicked off our platform. You’re done. But here’s some, but here’s some good questions to ask. We should put this in the podcast notes, right? So when you’re gonna get it, when you’re deciding what to do, you want to make sure, you wanna make sure first of all, how much volume are you gonna need?

Then you want to make sure the company you’re dealing with deals with your type of business, they’re familiar with your business. What? No matter what it is. Oh, do you? Do you know, oh, I do car repair. Occasionally we keyer. Oh, so you want to get good advice from whatever it is that you sell. Oh, I sell, I’m opening a strip club.

Do you deal with strip clubs? Some guy will say, oh no, I’ve gotten strip club apps from people. And they’ll say, oh, some guy signed me up and he put down, it was a hamburger restaurant. And then of course they get shut off, a week later. You don’t want to de, you want to make sure people can write on the application what you do for what your business does.

You do not want to lie to the bank about what you do. Oh, I sell cbd. Oh, I sell. I sell bongs, right? Wholesale bongs, and people buy bongs from me, or they sell rolling papers, whatever it is you sell. Oh, I have a doctor’s office and we give out marijuana prescriptions. There’s a, we have 15 banks.

There’s a bank for everything, for sure. Oh, I have digital. I’m doing a creator website and I have content on there. Live content. Oh, do you deal with that? Yes, we do. We have a bank that will deal with that. You have to know, you have to ask the right questions to know, oh, if I want support, how do I get support?

Is there, do I get support through you? Is there a 24 hour support line? Is there a help desk? How do I get help? The other thing you want to ask is, when you’re dealing with e-commerce, you want to make sure you know about, what gateway they’re giving you, what gateway features that you need.

You want to make sure you set up your velocity controls so that you don’t get hit with a ca by a card tester. We’ve had two or three people in the last couple years get hit with card testers. Somebody has a big list of cards, they, robot, somebody’s website because you don’t have a capture, you don’t have security donezo, and then boom, you, all of a sudden you see five gazillion emails coming through your thing.

If you’re a merchant and you start seeing emails coming through authorized.net or whatever the gateway is, dude, you need to hop on the phone to authorize.net. Say br, shut down my gateway asap. Asap. You wake up in the middle of the night, that no. You hop on the phone and you get that taken care of.

That during the day you call your merchant processor. We had somebody the other day they called me up at 11 o’clock at night. I was like I freaking emailed somebody at the processor. Called the guy’s cell phone. I said, bro, turn this guy’s account off. We called up off net, turned it off and averted a nightmare.

Good for you. It was already a few hundred transact. They were coming through like a waterfall. Terrible man. But the guy was on, Johnny on the spot called me and we took care of it, your checkout process on your website, had somebody review that, do you need check boxes? Does your website have all the things on it that you need to have on it? Terms and conditions, policies, disclaimers, when you’re even in a retail store, do you want to have all sales are final? Refunds, no refunds, exchange only. Whatever it is, you need to have it on there. You want to make sure you can grow your business.

Do you, are you doing recurring transactions? Are what are you doing? So you wanna make sure whoever’s helping you that they’re helping, that you’re, they’re answering all your questions and they’re familiar with your business type and they can give you good advice.

Absolutely. And there’s one thing we skipped over on there. At the end of the day, when you’re, when your business is, doing 10, 20,000 a month, it’s gonna be way cheaper than PayPal. That’s for sure. Oh, you definitely are gonna be cheaper to have. Yeah. Way cheaper. Maybe not way cheaper, but you’re gonna be saving some money on those fees from the processing fees from PayPal, that’s for sure.

Yeah. You’re gonna say, you’re gonna save money. Plus, like I said, there’s more flexibility, right? So yeah, man. Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok LinkedIn. And YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel, B2B Vault podcast. Turn on the subscribe button, post notifications so that you know when we’re posting on there.

Find us on all the podcast apps that we’re on. We’ll give a shout out. Good pods. We’re on that one too now. Oh, yeah. Dang. They tagged me the other day. All right, shut out. Good pods. Yeah, man, we’re on every. Dsp. You can imagine if we’re not there and there’s somewhere that you think we should be, give us a, let us know.

I fixed the form. There was a capture problem on the re the guest form. Oh, okay. So I was telling everyone that they weren’t human. Sorry. I’m sorry. I fixed it. I put in a the basic, math problem for now. Okay. Which is crazy because the bots are able to work around that too now.

Yeah, it’s nuts. The, it’s nuts because now we have AI to deal with and ai, AI is paying humans to go to the recapture. Think about that one that’s messed up. AI is causing fraud right now. You gotta be very careful. Yep. With your website, your personal data. Do not click links. You don’t know.

Don’t open up. Attachments. If you don’t know who it’s from, be careful. So check us out. Thank you for listening to the podcast, Carpe dm. Peace out Rock is taking a nap, but everybody have a great day.