Q. Contemplating switching Merchant Account / Transition?

[William Davis]

Contemplating switching Merchant Account, for sake of transitioning (currently using Miva Pay and AuthorizeNet), would it be a good idea (if possible), to have two Merchant accounts until new account has been proven to be working without any problems before closing old account?

If so, how (technically speaking)?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

The nice thing about using MivaPay is we are storing the real credit card numbers for you, so you can change payment gateways to any other supported by MivaPay without losing customers' stored cards, subscriptions, etc. If you change gateways, activating the new one and inactivating the old one in your store should switch transaction processing to the new gateway instantly, and you can just as easily flip it back if there are issues. However, if you only intend to change merchant accounts, while preserving the current gateway, that can be more of a concern because if anything goes wrong, your ability to change the settings back will only be as fast as the payment gateway provider can make them, and you may also not know when they implement the initial change in the first place. For that reason, when changing merchant accounts, it's not a bad idea to open a second payment gateway account that maps to it, even with the same provider, so you can have the control over switching between those settings. If all is well, cancel the old gateway and merchant account later.

[Rick Wilson]

Also Auth.net isn't your processor, just your virtual terminal/gateway. You can switch merchant providers and keep Auth.net, that's one of the reasons it's so popular.

[William Davis]

The nice thing about using MivaPay is we are storing the real credit card numbers for you, so you can change payment gateways to any other supported by MivaPay without losing customers' stored cards, subscriptions, etc. If you change gateways, activating the new one and inactivating the old one in your store should switch transaction processing to the new gateway instantly, and you can just as easily flip it back if there are issues. However, if you only intend to change merchant accounts, while preserving the current gateway, that can be more of a concern because if anything goes wrong, your ability to change the settings back will only be as fast as the payment gateway provider can make them, and you may also not know when they implement the initial change in the first place. For that reason, when changing merchant accounts, it's not a bad idea to open a second payment gateway account that maps to it, even with the same provider, so you can have the control over switching between those settings. If all is well, cancel the old gateway and merchant account later.

ILoveHostasaurus, great advise, thank old friends from the Hostasaurus days!

Contemplating switching to BAMS.com (payment services First Data Merchant Services LLC) from North American Bancard for significantly better rates, please PM me if you any comments and/or suggestions.

[Rick Wilson]

We don't have a FDMS module, so you'd need to keep Auth.net anyway. Email me, I would assume we can beat/match anything BAMS gets you as well.