If you haven’t heard specifically about a gateway account, marketing sms you can think of it as a credit card terminal, but instead of a physical machine, it’s a program that resides on a webserver. The gateway basically gets the transaction information from your customer to the merchant account bank for processing. It handles the sending and receiving of the financial information including the credit card information and billing information and the subsequent

One of the features of a gateway company is the ability of the merchant to run transactions manually assuming a phone / fax or even a “live” transaction needs to take place before a product or service can be delivered. The virtual terminal is usually accessed via the login to the gateway and an easy link is there to allow the owner to input the credit card information and the billing information as well to process the transaction.

The fees associated with the gateway account are usually based on three components, the setup, the monthly fee, and a per transaction fee. Expect to pay around $25 to $150 for the setup, $5 to $15 for the monthly and anywhere from $.00 to $.10 per transaction for the gateway service. Keep in mind that these fees are usually above and beyond what the merchant account provider will charge you for the merchant account processing fees.

Depending on who you use for your merchant account provider, you can usually get a very competitive rate and pricing that includes bundled fees to where your total monthly fee is less than $25 (which is about what the Paypal professional account costs). With this “real” merchant account, you’ll usually be lower on your processing fees as well.receipt of the approval or denial codes that the bank sends back based on the credit card information.