A previous post by The Official Merchant Services Blog featured a story about what credit card companies are doing to make themselves the more alluring choice instead of debit during this holiday shopping season. Today’s post is a bit of a follow up to that, with a specific program that one credit card company is offering to merchants that will take things up a notch significantly.
Host Merchant Services is able to offer an exclusive deal to its merchants with the new Add Discover on Discover plan. This plan comes at just the right time for merchants as holiday shopping will increase their traffic and sales. This offer from Discover, through Host Merchant Services is bold. It essentially gives qualifying merchants a year of being able to process Discover payments at no cost. Add Discover on Discover gives the merchants no fees when their customers swipe a Discover card. And they have this benefit for an entire year.
The Details of the Plan
To qualify for the Add Discover on Discover program from Host Merchant Services, you must have not processed any Discover cards in the past six months of doing business. Discover card processing includes Discover, Diners Club International, BCcard, China Union Pay, JCB and DinaCard. That’s it. That’s all you need to qualify. Once you qualify it’s a series of easy steps to get the program started:
- Enroll in the program by December 31, 2011.
- Confirm your enrollment with a required test transaction.
- Update signage at your place of business (or on your website if you are an e-commerce only merchant).
- Inform your employees and actively promote Discover to your customers to start reaping the savings.
Once you’ve been verified you will receive written notice from Discover. Within 10 business days of your acceptance you’ll receive a welcome letter with free Discover signage and tips for increasing your sales with Discover.
Benefits of the Plan
This plan is really good for merchants that haven’t been accepting Discover cards. Every Discover transaction you process for 12 full months will cost you nothing  –– no limits, no exceptions. Coming right at the end of the year, this plan is the type of holiday shopping incentive that is extremely lucrative for merchants. Discover makes a big push to get merchants to promote using their cards at a time when the interchange fees on debit card usage got hard capped by the Durbin Amendment.
Durbin Amendment Works For This Too
In fact, one of the other features of the Durbin Amendment can help Discover get added hype and promotional assistance from this Add Discover on Discover plan. As Host Merchant Services pointed out in their Dubin Amendment analysis earlier this year, one of the key pieces of the legislation focuses on competition within the payment processing industry: “[The Durbin Amendment] seeks to stop major credit and debit card networks from imposing penalties on small businesses, merchants and government agencies. The law applies to banks with over $10 billion in assets and restricts these large banks and credit card companies from using their dominant market power to force merchants to accept anti-competitive restrictions. To put it simply, large credit card companies are no longer able to punish merchants for offering discounts to customers for using another card network; or discounts for using cash, check, debit card or gift card and loyalty cards; or set a minimum or maximum transaction amount for payment by card.”
So what this means is Discover can usher in this new program –– which offers no transaction fees for a year –– to attract merchants, and those merchants seeing how much more of a savings this can provide them over other options can freely promote Discover over the competition, with no fear of punishment or penalty. Durbin lets a merchant promote the better deal for their business.
For More Information
This landmark offer only lasts until December 31, 2011. If you are interested in finding out more about it, feel free to Contact Host Merchant Services.
You can also read more about the offer by downloading one of the two PDFs Host Merchant Services provides on its resource page: