Do I need to get a merchant account for my eCommerce website? I had been asking myself the question for a long time. I eventually realized how many sales I had lost when I finally decided to get one.

If you’re running an eCommerce site, you surely know that the easiest way to accept payments is probably PayPal or Google Checkout. This is especially true for PayPal if you sell on eBay because PayPal is basically a credit card machine easily integrated with a shopping cart. They also made it easy for you to put a “Checkout” button on your site by providing a simple HTML code section. On the other hand, if you have a merchant account (with the ability to accept credit card payments), you’ll need to “integrate” it with your “shopping cart.” The integration results in a so-called virtual terminal, which is a web form for customers to fill in with their credit card information.

Now that you have PayPal or Google Checkout, which indirectly accept credit card payments, (why) do you still need a merchant account? Before I tell you why, I will first show you the proof that you need a merchant account.

Since images are not allowed in the article and no link to an image is allowed, I can only list the numbers I see on my eCommerce site’s sales log. I look at 40 most recent consecutive orders. I choose a consecutive order so they are not purposely handpicked for illustrative purposes only. (The image is powerful proof. Unfortunately, there is no way you can get the image shown in this article.) Among the 40 orders, 5 were paid with Google Checkout, 13 were paid with PayPal, and 22 were paid directly by credit card. which is 55% of the transactions. Although customers may be “forced” to select PayPal or Google Checkout when direct credit card is not an option, our experience has shown that adding the option immediately increased our sales by 100%. You read that correctly: sales doubled just because we got a business account. Still wondering if you need a merchant account? Every minute you wonder, you may be missing out on a sale!

So why would some people prefer to use a direct credit card? Here are my guesses:

1. Many card issuers give 1%, some even up to 5% cash back or some kind of incentive like airline mileage. They encourage you to use your card. So why don’t you do it?

2. Why go through an intermediary – PayPal or Google Checkout, if you are going to pay by credit card anyway? Paying through PayPal or Google Checkout means that you are giving your personal information to an additional party. This is especially true if the customer does not yet have a PayPal or Google Checkout account. We all have enough “accounts” already. Obviously, the more people you give your personal information to, the more prone you are to identity theft.