Setting Up a Credit Card Merchant Account

In order to sell, you need a way to take money. While there are a number of different ways
to take payments in order to have a functional
Merchant Solutions store, you must set up the store to accept credit-card payments. (Yahoo!
won’t allow you to open until you do so.) As this may take a few days to sort out, it would be
nice if you could start the process right away.
One thing you may need to prepare—you’ll need a land-line phone number. If you, like so
many people these days, only have a cell number, you’ll have to set up a land line before you
can apply for a merchant account if you want to use Paymentech, Yahoo!’s recommended
merchant-account provider (it’s one of Paymentech’s policies that you must have a land line).
On the other hand, the second recommended company, 1st American Card Service, does not
require this.
Unfortunately, you cannot complete the merchant account setup until some key items are
present—your store must be “ready for business with clear product and pricing information
available for viewing” so that the company issuing the merchant account can review it. Even
if you don’t have everything complete when you apply, you must at least have a site that looks
complete—one or more products, a contact page, privacy page, and so on. So go ahead and build
your store, and when you’re ready. Or perhaps get the
paperwork in now, but be aware that the process will grind to a halt fairly quickly.
You are backing up data, aren’t you? You need to protect your business information.
What if you lost all your product-catalog data, or lost the program that stores all your
passwords or all your accounting information? Would it hurt? Would it take much time
to recover? If you’re serious about doing business online, you need to find some way
to back up data. And that means off-site! One good strategy is to buy two external USB
hard drives and do a full backup onto both. Store one in your office and back up every
day, and store the other somewhere else, such as a safe-deposit box. Switch them every
week or two.
We’ll see how to enter your products into the store catalog.