How to avoid getting f*cked

A tale of a young newsletter

We have a fun one today!

And by fun I mean the least enjoyable, most annoying, and highest likely hood to cause a bottleneck in your business.

Payment processing.

Whether you're selling services, software, supplements, or tarot card readings a necessary reality is that you're going to need a way for people to pay you

Some examples: Stripe, Amazon Pay, Shop Pay, Authorize.net, etc...

You've probably heard of one if not all of the above. 

If you're new to this Wifi $ game you may be saying to yourself " Yes, I've heard of these and this is obvious. What's the big deal?".

The big deal is that these companies are frickin' terrorists. (kidding.. or am I?)

They can quite literally shut you down at any moment for being "too risky" without any real chance to appeal and lock in your funds for 90-180+ days. (I, Tommy, currently have $5,000 locked up with one.. more on that later)

Before we get to the real alpha of how to avoid shut downs and how to navigate setting up a merchant account, I'd like to go through some real examples of issues that both Wifi and myself have experienced:

- A monthly $10,000 revenue cap that was never mentioned in the sign up phase

- Holding of up to 25% of all money charged as a safety net

- Payment gate completely shut off for a full week due to copy on the website

- As mentioned above, reserve cash being held for 90-180 days when cancelling services

- Kicked off platform for "fraud" one week into a new venture because someone charged back

You get the point.

Merchant accounts are one of, if not the, biggest potential bottle necks for any business and are an aspect that you need to take seriously.

Now, Let's get to the good stuff.

How to avoid getting f*cked

I've been hearing a lot complaints about PayPal and Stripe.

As someone who has sold supplements before I know the struggle of getting banned/paused.

That's why you need a real merchant account.

You might be thinking, “isn’t Stripe a real merchant account?”

Well, not exactly. In fact, Stripe is just a software company not a bank.

And that’s one of the differences you need to understand earlier on. There are payment gateways and then there are payment processors (aka the bank).

A payment gateway is simply an interface or the software that allows you to swipe the credit card.

They encrypt and accept payments, that's all they do.

However, a merchant bank is the one who actually collects and processes the transaction in the backend.

The bank charges the gateway a fee and the gateway then marks up the fees to make some money themselves.

Cool, we all like to make money.

But here’s the problem…

Payment gateways have to pay fees for each transaction they send to the bank, so they want to make sure they are as safe as humanly possible.

The last thing they want is an account that is going to cost them money but then turns that they have a bunch of chargebacks.

So companies like Stripe and PayPal take it to the extreme, often grouping individuals in certain industries as being risky.

What are these industries?

You mainly have to worry if you’re selling supplements and selling make money opportunities.

Now let’s be real, I totally understand them.

There are PLENTY of bad actors in both of those industries.

But what if you’re a legit guy or gal trying to sell a supplement?

Or maybe you’re selling a FB ads course, not some low end biz opp offer?

Well, you’re shit out of luck because you are going to get grouped into the same bucket.

Which means, you get banned.

Companies like Stripe and PayPal became sort of this integrated (convenient) way of having both a gateway and a merchant at once.

They would act as the gateway and you will never know who the bank behind them is.

Problem: what if the bank flags you, who do you call?

Exactly... No one.

That's a problem.

Anyone online long enough has used **http://Authorized.net**.

Another gateway, who's a little more opened about their merchants as they tell you who's assigned to you.

And if you're a beginner and a bit lazy, they are a super safe option to use.

But if you really want to take things to the next level.

I recommend you find a merchant bank directly (like BankCardUSA) and plug into NMI (or even Authorize.net).

NMI is a very modern and clean payment gateway.

It's really cool...

You can plug in many other merchants and load balance your payment processing.

So if a bank takes you down (for any reason), you can still continue playing.

The best part is that even if a bank flags you, you can always call them up!

PayPal and Stripe will just boot you.

Advantages of using NMI as a gateway

By far, the coolest and most important feature that NMI provides is "load balancing."

I'll let them explain it themselves...

"Transaction Routing (previously known as Load Balancing) is a feature only available to Merchants with more than one processing service of the same “type” (cc or ach) boarded on their gateway account. Transaction Routing will “balance” transactions between two or more processors using percentages and amounts."

Once you are done with BankCardUSA, they'll set you up with an NMI account.

You don't need to open this account yourself.

Closing Note

Some of you reading this may be wondering “Wifi, Tommy…. why did I get refunded? I want to support this insanely valuable alpha and learn!”

Welp… the irony of this entire post is that WE GOT RUGGED.

You read that right.

The very thing we’re waning against happened to us with this newsletter. Our friends at a certain merchant that is utilized by this very platform hit us with the reverse Uno card.

But don’t you worry, friend. We have a plan!

You’ll be able to rejoin soon (we’ll be using the strategies listed above to prevent this from happening again)