Are you in need of supplemental credit card processing for your nutraceutical merchant account?

Nutraceutical Merchant Accounts

Nutraceutical merchants often have trouble finding online credit card processing, which seems ludicrous considering that nutraceutical industry, or “nutra” industry as a whole brings in a yearly revenue totaling $181.4 billion as of 2015, and is estimated to reach $204.6 billion by 2017.

Still, these merchants find it very difficult to find payment processing options with the potential of high chargebacks and continuity billing models, most banks consider nutraceutical merchant accounts too much of a risk.

How Can I get a Nutraceutical Merchant Account?

In theory, it’s pretty basic: fill out an application with a merchant account provider. Simple as that, right? Well, not so fast. When it comes to high risk merchant accounts, you’re kind of out there in this risky banks-won’t-touch-you area. So if the banks are backing off how do you get approved for payment processing?

You need to seek out a high risk merchant account provider that has bank sponsor relationships and the underwriting abilities to accept your nutraceutical business.

Since finding a nutraceutical merchant account provider with such abilities who is both experienced and reliable isn’t always easy – seeing as how the whole procedure depends upon if an underwriter can approve your nutraceutical merchant account – it’s often better to search for a few different credit card processors or sponsor banks to go through.

And that point begs the next question:

How Do I Go About Finding a High Risk Merchant Account for a Nutraceutical Company?

If you owned a low-risk business you’d have plenty of options, such as getting sponsored by federal banks like Wells Fargo or Chase. Unfortunately, those banks (and thus their processors) will not approve applications for nutraceutical merchant account because of the potential for regulatory and chargeback problems.

Here’s a breakdown for how to vet a quality payment processing company:

1. Look for a company that exclusively works with high risk merchants and has experience specifically with nutraceutical merchant accounts
2. Because underwriting guidelines vary so much, be sure to ask the business development person,”Can you write straight earnings or free trial nutraceutical merchant accounts?”
3. Be sure to also ask,”For your free trial nutraceutical accounts, what duration free trial (or how many trial days) do you take?”
4. When the business developer can not answer those questions relatively quickly, it’s likely that they don’t write many nutra merchant accounts – and are likely not credible or are wasting your time.

Why Does this Matter and How Can PayKings Help with Your Nutraceutical Merchant Account?

In a great deal of high chargeback e-commerce businesses, the secret is to quickly identify stolen credit cards as well as bad and fraudulent sales before they happen. While that’s certainly important in nutraceuticals, being aware of the issue isn’t enough. Rather, you have to ensure you make it incredibly simple for unhappy customers to contact you directly, as opposed to contacting their issuing bank, and if they do reach out to you with an issue, be sure to react in a friendly and quick manner – in many cases issue a complete refund if that’s the best way to resolve the customer complaint and avoid a chargeback.

PayKings is here to not only provide you with the highest quality payment processing options, but we also want to equip you with the proper tools to guard your merchant account from being pegged with excessive chargebacks as much as possible. Here are some specific examples for our nutraceutical merchants to use:

Send order confirmation emails: This is clear, but when a customer places an order, they should receive an electronic receipt. If you’re using a strong CRM they could handle this for you, if not, you can employ your gateway’s functionality. For nutraceutical merchant account retailers, this receipt should include or be followed by a delivery notification and a tracking number.

Send customer satisfaction emails: Yes, one goal is to figure out if the client liked the item, product, or service, but another reason is to time these emails to go out at precisely the same time that the client is reviewing their charge card statement. The goal would be to get the customer to call your business, as opposed to the issuing bank, to complain or request a refund – this is the simple alternative.

Maintain large transaction counts: Your chargeback ratio is mainly determined by the amount of monthly transactions, so a nutraceutical merchant account that only has a couple of hundred sales a month is much more vulnerable to a small chargeback spike compared to one who might see a couple thousand. 

How Does Being High Risk Affect Your Chances of Getting a Nutraceutical Merchant Account?

The primary reason nutraceutical companies are considered to be high risk is because of the amount of chargebacks businesses in this industry incur. Why do nutraceutical merchant accounts get a lot of chargebacks?

Good question. Nutraceutical businesses typically get more chargebacks compared to an ordinary online business, and certainly get more than retails spaces and card present business. Mostly, it’s the chargebacks that require a nutra company to use a high risk nutraceutical merchant account rather than being able to qualify for a low risk account.

Here are a few reasons why…

Nutraceutical businesses, particularly startups, assume that by providing a good product at a fair cost, and by being upfront with all of their terms, that all of their clients will be pleased. That is until the chargebacks start kicking in.

Experienced nutra businesses know about the number of the chargeback management tools available and use them readily. However, managing chargebacks isn’t something that a lot of companies do from the get-go, therefore they generally find out about these management tools well after it’s too late to save the MID.

Most nutraceutical companies utilize a membership, continuity, or recurring billing model. There is always some amount of customers who do not fully comprehend that they will be billed in the future, and when it shows up on their credit card statement, they start a chargeback claim.

Additionally, some nutraceutical businesses claim or insinuate incredible results for their products, and when it does not wind up working the way the product was advertised to, it leaves the consumer feeling scammed. And because a nutraceutical merchant account may accompany smaller businesses, they generally don’t have a strong customer service call center setup to deal with disgruntled clients – and the more disgruntled the customers – the more they get hit with unnecessary chargebacks.