The task of finding a good merchant account begins with learning about them so you can recognize a good one when you find it. Unfortunately, this is also where frustration with merchant accounts tends to begin. It’s not easy to find accurate, unbiased information about merchant accounts and credit card processing. Worse yet, it’s tough to decipher the good sources of information from the bad. This article will uncover the motivation behind the vast supply of merchant account information and it will show you how to recognize the reliable sources.

Affiliate marketers produce much of the information on the Internet, and not surprisingly, they’re also responsible for much of the information online about merchant accounts and credit card processing. An affiliate marketer makes money by referring customers to companies that they’re partnered with. If a referral results in a sale, the affiliate marketer gets paid a flat fee or a percentage of profits depending on their agreement.

Some affiliate marketers produce accurate helpful information while others produce as much content as possible without much regard to its usefulness or accuracy. A popular method among affiliate marketers to produce content is to hire writers through online freelance sites. These writers are hired to produce articles and tutorials at steeply discounted rates and most have little or no knowledge about merchant accounts and credit card processing.

Again, some affiliate marketers do create useful web sites and information and it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between the reliable and not so reliable sources. But before getting to the finer points, let’s talk about how to recognize marks of all affiliate marketers. The goal of an affiliate marketer is to send customers to partners and they need to track how much traffic they’re sending. Merchant account information that’s is produced by affiliate marketers will have a lot of outbound links to merchant service providers with symbols and number appended to the end of the link such as “?aid=123.” These numbers are the affiliate’s ID number and they tell the partner company who to credit for any sales.

Once you spot merchant account information posted by an affiliate marketer it’s time to see if it’s worth your time to read it. A lot of spelling and grammatical errors with text is the first and most obvious sign of bad information. Also look for “last updated” dates. A web site full of information that hasn’t been updated in a long time isn’t going to be much help. Lastly, stay clear of web sites that offer very general merchant account information. Information that looks like it was briefly researched before the text was written is not the type of information you want to rely on.

Another big contributor of online content about merchant accounts and credit card processing are the companies that offer payment services. Thankfully, the information offered by providers is usually far more accurate than the information offered by affiliate marketers – but there’s a catch. While the information that providers offer is more accurate, it’s often skewed by a bias toward the author’s merchant account services.

There’s no doubt that the professionals in the industry know the most about merchant accounts and credit card processing. The problem is that they also know how to skew information to make their products and services look better than the competition’s. Merchant account information web sites maintained by merchant service providers aren’t always easy to spot.

Many providers go to great lengths to keep their informational sites from appearing as though they’re endorsing their products or services. To spot merchant account information sites maintained by merchant service providers, look for subtle links in the footer of the home page. Pay attention to overly positive language referencing any one merchant service provider. Merchant account information posted by providers can often prove accurate and helpful as long as you’re aware of inherent bias and take care to double-check any facts that seem speculative.