If you own a business online and you're looking to make the leap into credit card processing there will be several factors to consider. Among them are how much experience the merchant accounts provider has with businesses like yours, what their pricing structure is and what their references say.

But don't sign any deal until you thoroughly investigate any contending company's technical support. Having tech support is like being a member of an emergency auto club; you hope you'll never need it but when you do you are so glad you made the investment.

Because when you are processing credit cards online, if a problem ever arises this isn't like an mp3 music-downloading program you added to your computer. You're not going to be able to troubleshoot the problem on your own. Credit card online processing has too many players and too much security for you to make the repair.

If something goes wrong with your merchant services you're going to need someone who knows what to look for, how to diagnose the problem and how to fix it quickly.

Because when you don't have that here is your retailing nightmare. You have several customers shopping your site. They are gathering their purchases and head for checkout. But because of a glitch somewhere they can't pay for their purchases.

You see there is a problem and call the help desk. But you get put on hold because no one is there. Or they have gone home for the day.

Then something like the following may happen. Your customers' screen freeze and they are afraid to reboot because there is no indication on the status of the transaction. Or they try and wait it out and their session runs its course and logs them off the site.

And whether it's the above scenarios, or ones like that, the bottom line is that they are going to click over to a site that isn't having problems, and take their business away from you - perhaps forever.

Think about it -- what will that cost you? Maybe you can't put a price on love, but a person with an online business with poor tech support can put a price on consumer anger.

So if you are considering a company for credit card online processing services you need to make sure that their technical support people are available 24/7. Your online store never closes, so the people making sure it stays online should always be there for you. And this is an area where they need to bat 1.000 - there's no room for anything less.

It won't even hurt to see if you can't give it a test before you sign on. Make a call later in the evening or on the weekend. See how fast that call gets answered. Or do you get an automated service that tries to dance you through several prompts before you have the option to take to a real person?

You will consider a number of companies, but make sure any provider that you may sign with can prove they have superior customer service and technical support. Hopefully you will never need it, but you'll sleep better knowing its there.

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