Best Merchant Account for Restaurants
You might not have expected to have such a hard time setting up a restaurant merchant account – but you wouldn’t be the first restaurant manager or owner to hit a road bump when it comes to setting up an effective transaction processing system.
Why Your Restaurant Merchant Account Matters
Operating a restaurant generally involves a high volume of relatively small transactions. If you’re paying a transaction fee on every one of those, your profits are quickly eaten up in the simple process of getting the cash from your customers’ credit card into your own account.
A merchant account allows you to eliminate a lot of the fees involved in processing a high volume of payments by other means. Trying to run a restaurant without such an account is highly impractical – but the Catch-22 is that most banks and other traditional merchant account providers are reluctant to open merchant accounts for restaurants, and in some cases will flat-out refuse simply because of the industry you’re in.
Restaurant Start-Up and Operation Dangers
Why are banks so reluctant to set up a merchant account for restaurants? In large part it’s due to the fact that food service is seen as such a risky industry, with extremely high business failure rates.
Most restaurants operate on a knife-edge with thin profit margins, so a few percentage points of difference in your transaction processing fees can make a huge difference to your profitability and, ultimately, the survival of your business.
It’s a well-known fact that few start-up restaurants survive more than a year or two. Even if your restaurant is established, the constant threat from new competition means you can’t afford to be running at a sub-standard level of profitability. You don’t want to be groveling to a bank for a merchant account, only to find the ones that will offer you an account will slap a bunch of set-up, maintenance and high transaction fees on it.
Getting Lower Fees on a Restaurant Merchant Account
At eMerchantBroker we recognize these particular challenges facing restaurants, and we aim to offer solutions that will help your business thrive – rather than simply adding another risk. That’s why we actually offer lower pricing options for restaurants, to offset the natural industry risk that arises as a result of thin and ever-changing margins. Most providers and brokers won’t even let you in on the fact that you can qualify for special pricing as a restaurant.
Ensure Compatibility
We work hard to ensure compatibility between our merchant accounts and a wide array of hardware used by various businesses all over the world. One major frustration for restaurant owners is that once they do finally come across a bank willing to give them a merchant account, they can’t integrate it with their point-of-sale hardware and software. We’ve eliminated that risk to a large extent by having the foresight to ensure compatibility with all the most common hardware and software used by restaurant businesses.