If you've done any research at all, you've probably already realized that getting into the field of selling merchant services can be extremely profitable. Just about every serious business needs a merchant account, so the number of prospects that you could work with are countless and the market is ever-expanding as the economy recovers.

You might also realize, though, that becoming a registered ISO or starting a credit card processing company yourself can be expensive, but luckily this is not your only option when you're looking to break into this field. One of the best ways to get into the digital payments business is to start your career out as a independent sales agent. The upfront costs are minimal, and you can learn the business inside and out with a lot of room for growth. It's one of those coveted sales positions where you not only get commission at the time of the sale, but you usually receive residuals for the life of the account.

The key to success as a merchant services agent is choosing the right partner company to work with—this is an ISO whose products and services you will be offering to merchants. Since finding the best ISO agent program is so imperative to your future, take your time to consider who will be the best fit for you.

Top 5 Merchant Services Agent ISO Programs

In order to help you get started on your quest, here are five of the best ISO agent programs out there that you can look into:

Looking for a company that has a lot of experience and support? This can be especially important when you're first starting out. You don't want to just be left in the dust whenever you have questions or if something goes wrong. We are very committed to offering the best service possible to not only our end-users, but more importantly to our sales agents. We provide you with the latest technology, varied offers to give to your merchants, and top-notch service. We also offer extremely fast payments, and in fact will pay you every day instead of making you wait for weeks.

If you are a sales-oriented individual with vast experience in the world of credit card processing or you are a driven and motivated professional looking for a new challenge, Shaw Merchant Group will be a great fit for you. With the most competitive commission structure in the industry, SMG will see to it that you are rewarded for your efforts.

As one of the best ISO agent programs, SMG has a history of a favorable commission structure, superior products, and sales support for our ISO partners. With so much commission at stake, you will truly feel like a partner in the SMG business plan.

With Shaw Merchant Group's white label program, you'll be able to market under your own brand, without paying costly annual fees! Your brand will be seen on the partner portal, marketing communications, merchant statements, and much more.

Part of working in any field is having a niche, but oftentimes you can find yourself partnered with a company that won't approve of the merchants that you want to work with. Nothing is more disappointing than having great personal connections and prospects, but needing to turn them down because they run a “high risk” business, such as a liquor store, an e-commerce business, or any sort of retail store that would be subject to a lot of charge-backs.

With EMS's program, however, you won't have to worry about any of that. They will deal with just about any sort of merchant, including high-risk applicants. In fact, they approve about 95% of the merchants who seek accounts with them. This is good news for your clients and for you—especially since high risk merchant accounts can be particularly lucrative.

Electronic Merchant Systems is a good choice if your merchant is an e-commerce business. They offer multiple gateways to make sure your client's shopping cart software will work perfectly with them. Give them a try, especially if your merchants tend to get rejected by other ISO's.

Want to go with a leader in the industry? North American Bancard is a great ISO with a lot of options for the ambitious sales agent. For one, they have a proven track record of service and have been around since 1992. They offer some of the easiest-to-navigate merchant applications around, a great support team, and in-depth training so that you can sell more effectively and grow in your payment processing career. They were among the firsts in the business to offer lifetime residuals from every deal that their sales agents close. If you want a reliable company that will let you build the passive income side of your business, you should seriously consider NAB.

Naturally, you are probably going to want to research more than just a few companies, but these are truly some of the best and brightest in the industry, and it's not a bad list to start with. Before anything else, it's important to perform a self-assessment and decide what your needs and wants are when it comes to an ISO partnership. Really, this means asking yourself: What kind of ISO is going to best serve my clients? If you still have no idea, that's perfectly fine. You don't have to limit yourself to a single ISO, and in fact it's probably a good idea when you are starting out to try several different processors.

Maybe you're looking for a very reliable company that has a history of great service and close relationships with their merchants and sales agents. In that case, you won't go wrong with PayProTec. They offer great customer support, as well as extensive online resources that you can use to build your business. When you sign up as a merchant services agent, you get a free website, a back-end portal where you can check your stats online, and the ability to look up trouble tickets and see any problems that your merchants are having. Like NAB and a few others mentioned here, they also have a free terminal program.

Interestingly enough, they're not just paying lip service when they say that they care about their sales agents—they offer health care benefits and will reimburse half of your costs! This definitely helps to relieve one of the bigger headaches of being self-employed.

Shift 4 Payments is one of the largest providers of POS systems and payment processing services in the US. They handle over one hundred thousand merchant accounts across the nation, and billions of dollars worth of transactions. Part of the reason they are so ubiquitous in the payment processing field is no doubt due to their superior merchant services agent program. They have smart, forward-thinking, and extremely competitive offers that make selling merchant services a snap compared to more “traditional” programs. For example, they helped pioneer the introduction of free terminal offers. In other words, you can provide the hardware to your client for no upfront costs to them, and still receive a handsome commission and great residuals afterwards.

“Free” is not a hard sell at all, so even if you choose another company, it's probably a good idea for you to make sure that your merchant services partner has a free terminal program. It's not always going to be a good fit for every merchant, but rest assured that more and more of your clients will be expecting free equipment.

One of the most lucrative fields that you can get into as a salesperson is selling to other businesses and especially selling merchant services. Unlike most end consumers, business owners keenly understand the value of investing wisely in long-term solutions, and not merely throwing away their money on something cheap. If you want to truly contribute value to other business owners, while making a decent paycheck every month yourself, one of the best ways to do that is to offer quality merchant services. You will be invaluable to your clients, and if you serve them well, they will continue to look to you for ways to make their business more efficient.

Why start selling on your own, though? Isn't that a lot more work? What are the benefits if you're already working in a commission-based kind of job? Well, here are a few of the major ones:

More Control

Even if you're working in a field where you get a relative amount of independence, like in sales, you still don't have complete control, and your whole work life revolves around satisfying someone else's numbers. You may have your own personal selling style, but the overall strategy that the company follows—the direction in which “the ship” is being steered—is not determined by you, but by someone else. This may not be such a bad thing for some people, but it also means that your livelihood is ultimately in someone else's hands. What if the owners of the company that you work for make a dumb decision that spells the end of the business? You will have to suffer the consequences anyway, even though it wasn't your fault.

More Cash

Of course, if you own your own business, you have the potential to make a lot more money than someone who doesn't. If you're an independent contractor, at the end of the day, the people above you are raking in the most money. Sure, as a merchant services representative, you might make a hefty percentage of that, but the fact of the matter is that your potential for financial growth is stunted. If you have a business that you control yourself, it is basically up to you how much money you want to make, and you keep more of the fruits of your hard work.

The Potential for Scale

The thing about a normal job, even a merchant services sales job, where you're working for someone else, is that you rarely have the possibility to scale things up. In other words, you can't “replicate” yourself by hiring someone else to do some of your tasks, and this can greatly reduce your long-term income potential. When you run your own merchant services business, you can choose to run it in many different ways, but one way is to outsource the work slowly until your business can practically run on its own. For true residual, passive income, this is the kind of situation that you will want to be in. This is what makes it possible for you to work because you want to, and to make money even in your sleep. You just can't do this when you work for someone else.

Now, you may be thinking: How to start a payment processing company? Maybe you've been a salesperson for awhile—maybe you've even been selling POS equipment and other important retail tools—but you're not sure how to make that leap into selling for yourself.

Well, unless you've invented and designed your own solutions, you're going to have to start by forming a partnership with a company that you believe in. They're going to have to make a product that you can really get behind because, if you're building a business for yourself, most of your money is ultimately going to come from the back-end, from repeat customers. This is why it is so important to take a step back and think about quality above anything else. By all means, find a program that is lucrative, but don't ever sell a product that you wouldn't feel enthusiastic about using yourself. In the end, this is what is really going to create repeat business.

What traits do you look for in a merchant services agent program, then? Don't be taken in by any fancy bells and whistles. Basically, these are the things you are going to want to see:

A History of Reliability

Again, there's no sense in selling shoddy services or products. Look up reviews of the company and decide if they are any good. Research their products and make sure that they are user-friendly. Find a way to use them if you can. The easiest products to sell are the ones that are actually good because they basically sell themselves time and time again.

Generous Revenue Share

Since this is going to be the core of your business, you are going to want to find a merchant services partnership that gives you a good cut of the sales. If you're doing all the work of finding and maintaining leads, then you need a fair percentage of what that customer is paying.

Residual Income

Part of what makes selling merchant services and POS services so lucrative is that there is often a monthly fee involved or else the merchant services company takes a percentage of the user's sales. As a partner, make sure that you have access to a significant portion of that long-term income as well. This is what is going to pay you month after month, even long after you have made the initial sale. This is where most of your money is, really.

Lots of Options and Flexibility

The company you work with should have lots of different options when it comes to revenue sharing, that way you will be able to build a strategy out of the one that best suits your business.

If you are ready to dive into the world of becoming an ISO for merchant services, then you are probably on the prowl for the best ISO agent program. The merchant processing industry is a lucrative one, but only when the ISO chooses the right partner to operate under. The ISO agent program that you choose to operate under can have a big impact on your earnings, quality of business, range of potential clients, payout frequency, and many other parts of your business that should be considered essential. This short guide will give you the information that you need to select the best credit card processing ISO program in the industry and will even give you a bit of information about who we feel has the best ISO agent program and why.

Why is it important to select the best ISO agent program?

It is important to pick out the best ISO agent program because the program that you choose will have some very drastic effects on the income that you are able to earn and other aspects of your business. If you want to set your business up for success in merchant processing, then choosing the ISO program that you are going to be operating under is a highly essential part of that process.

Each ISO agent program attempts to achieve relatively the same thing, but with different benefits and results that attract different types of clients and merchants. You should never assume that all ISO agent programs are the same and have the same benefits, rates, payouts, and other incentives to get you to use their program. Carefully screen the specifications of each program to actually find the program that is right for you.

Is it the same for everyone?

When it comes to finding the best ISO agent program in the industry, the truth is that there is no one answer that fits the needs of everyone. Each ISO program is different with their pay structures, marketing tools, and other resources that they give you to succeed in merchant services. So, the answer likely won’t be the same for everyone and will instead depend on what industry you’re in.

However, that’s not to say that some programs don’t rise above the rest. There are certainly programs out there that have displayed excellence time and time again, giving themselves an excellent reputation when it comes to payments, resources, and the other benefits that a particular program is able to offer.

While one program doesn’t usually fit all sizes, you can increase your chances of having success as an ISO by picking out a program that has repeatedly exceeded expectations and set the gold standard when it comes to ISO agent programs.

What to look for in a credit card processing ISO program

When you are in the process of selecting a program, there are some select features that you should be examining to ensure you find the right program for you. Here are some of the features that you should look for when screening potential ISO agent programs for your ISO to partner with and offer merchant services.

Payout

When you partner with an ISO agent program, you definitely want to make sure that they pay accurately and that they pay on time. Closing sales as an ISO won’t help you unless you are actually being paid your residuals and commissions that are due to you. Make sure that the company that you work with has a reputation for paying on time.

Residuals

A very important factor that you should take into consideration when selecting an ISO agent program to work with is what the residual rate is. These rates range from 50%-75% and are the backbone of your business. Earning residuals is often passive after the initial setup, so be sure that you are getting as big of a share of them as possible before moving forward.

Marketing Advantages

When you partner with an ISO agent program, you want to be sure that the program you select has the tools and resources to make you more successful in merchant services. This includes the access that they give you to their marketing materials, initiatives, promotions, and literature that you can use to sway clients into signing on with your ISO.

Who has the best ISO program in the industry?

If you’re looking to partner with the best in the business, then you can’t do much better than Shaw Merchant Group. SMG has continuously proven their excellence and the quality of our ISO agent program. This ISO agent program has many benefits including high residual rates, prompt and accurate payments, and the ability to help market your services and provide you with the resources you need to close more sales. Choose Shaw Merchant Group if you want to set up your ISO for success now and in the future.

Merchant processing is one of the hottest and most popular lucrative fields in business right now, and that leaves many wondering how they can make a name for themselves in merchant processing. Becoming a registered ISO is one of the best ways to make money in merchant processing and establish a vast network that continues to bringin passive residuals over time. With a successful ISO, you can truly be setting yourself up for a lifetime of success and income that continues to grow. However, the process of becoming an ISO for Merchant Services is not always the simplest one, especially for those that have never registered as an Independent Sales Organization before.

If you want to know how to become a registered ISO and start earning the money that comes along with this lucrative profession, then you are in the right place. We will walk you through some of the basic concepts that surround becoming an ISO and teach you the steps to becoming a merchant services ISO so that you can begin building a better income for your future. Follow along to learn the pathway that you must take if you are going to become a registered ISO.

What is an ISO?

Before you become a merchant services ISO and go through the lengthy process that it entails, you must first make sure that you have a good grasp on what exactly an ISO is and what it would mean for you to become an ISO.

An ISO is an organization that is responsible for selling merchant services, such as processing, to businesses. ISOs operate under larger companies, for which they sell their services. In addition to being a type of “agent” themselves, ISOs also have agents that work underneath them to help sell their products and services.

ISOs make money by earning a commission of processing services that are sold and they also earn money by providing services to the merchant accounts that are opened by their agents. ISOs are a hub of activity in the merchant processing world and since so many transactions run through them, it can be a very lucrative field to be in.

One thing that you will need to know is that an ISO is a legally registered business, so you will have to decide which type of business you want to register as. There are a number of options, each one providing its benefits and downfalls. Make sure that you have a plan of action for when you get to this stage of the process.

Is it worth it to become an ISO?

Being an ISO has a lot of similarities to being a merchant services agent, but there are some key differences. Both allow you to make money by selling merchant services and processing agreements, but being an agent is slightly more limiting than being an ISO. That’s not to say that being an ISO is easy, because it is not. There are months of work that go into being either of these designations.

However, there are some advantages that make it worth it to become a registered ISO if you want to make a splash in the merchant services industry. One of these advantages is that you will get to operate under your own business name. This gives you added credibility when conducting business with your customers and provides you with an easier marketing task. When you are an agent for an ISO or larger merchant services company, you are not able to use your own business name to market yourself. This can turn into a disadvantage if you are trying to create your own brand.

Another distinct advantage to being a merchant services or credit card processing ISO is that you can earn money in more ways than one. When you become a registered ISO, you will have the opportunity to have sub-agents below you that can earn money and residuals for your ISO. As a regular agent, you don’t have this ability and your income is limited to what you can sell with the time that you alone have. Being an ISO allows you to scale up your business and provide you with income around the clock.

All in all, becoming an ISO is a step that can really launch your career in merchant services and set you up for a much higher long-term income.

How to register

If you have decided that becoming an ISO is the right choice for you, then congratulations. Becoming an ISO is an accomplishment that can open a lot of doors for you. First, you’ll need to register and work through the legal and administrative hurdles that stand between you and becoming an ISO.

Pick a name

This step is very important and allows you to enjoy the benefit of being an ISO and branding yourself rather than being forced to operate a different brand.

Decide on your business type

Depending on your unique situation and circumstances, you will need to pick the business type that you will be creating. This is very important down the line.

Register with state

Make sure that you file all the necessary paperwork with your state.

Get your permits

This will vary from state to state, but you will at least need a business license to operate and start accepting payments.

Register with tax agency

Register your business with local and national tax agencies to ensure you are compliant with all tax regulations and obligations.

Create a plan

Create your business plan and organize staff, buildings, etc.

Find a  sponsor

Find a reputable and high-quality parent merchant services company that you can operate under to provide your clients with good service.

Create a contract

Create and review the contract that you make with your sponsor company to ensure you are both on the same page and understand what you are obligated to.

Finalize your sponsor

Once you are comfortable with the contract, go ahead and finalize your contract to cement the deal.

Start selling!

Now that you’re an ISO, the sky is the limit. Find sub-agents, close deals, and market your ISO as its own unique business.

How You Can Make 6-Figures Selling Merchant Services

Selling merchant services is popularly known to be very lucrative, but one of the most asked questions by many potential ISO agents is how much money can you make selling merchant services? They want to know whether they will be able to make a sustainable income from selling merchant products and services.

There is no straight answer to this popular question because the amount of money you make is dependent on the effort and handwork you put in. Those who have succeeded in selling credit card processing have shown exceptional dedication and hard work.

If you are wondering about how to become a merchant service provider and become successful in it, then hard work and dedication must be part of you.

Showing you the potential income that you can make selling merchant services is the simplest way to answer this burning question; how much money can you make selling credit card processing services?

According to research, selling payment processing services has the potential to earn hardworking and determined agents over $100k per year.

How You Can Earn $100k Per Year Selling Merchant Accounts

It is important to realize that merchant services agents get about $600 upfront for every new customer they sign up.

This amount is paid instantly after an agent manages to make a deal.

In addition to this, successful agents also receive a monthly pay out that on average increases by $1250 per month. This money is known as residual income. According to experts, $1250 is low, bearing in mind that success rates are depending on the agent's skill level.

Understanding Residual Income

If you are looking into how to start a credit card processing company, then you need to understand about residual income.

When the merchant you have signed up for the service use their credit card to receive payments, the payment processing company will receive a certain percentage of the amount received.

As long as the merchants' continue to be happy with the credit card processing products and services, the payment processing company will continue receiving a certain percentage of the money transfers.

The ISO agent who signed the merchant client up for service will receive 50%-80% of this income. This means that every time the merchant client is using their credit card, then the ISO agent will be making money. This is what is known as residual or passive income.

Now that you understand what residual income is, let us take a good example of how to start a payment processing company and make over $100k in a year.

Assuming that the ISO agent is capable of signing 15 new merchant accunts every month. On average, the ISO agent as an example will receive $100 per month as residual income per merchant, which would be $1500 per month. Of course these amounts skyrocket if the ISO agent is selling the dual pricing program. This program wipes out all fees for the merchant client and produces 5X residual income.

If you are hardworking enough, you will manage to raise their monthly income to about $9000 on average per month, which will translate to about $108,000 per year. This now answers the question; how much money you are able to make selling merchant services?

Tips To Help You Make $100k as a Merchant Services Provider

There are things that you need to put in place in addition to being hardworking in order to succeed. These tips will help you understand how to become a credit card processor and to easily make $100k per year. In order to make 6 figures in merchant services sales, you need to:

1. Set Your Goal: Just like in any industry, business goals are very important. These help you to be disciplined and stay focused on what you need to do. If you wish to make $9000 per month, then set that as your goal and put it the effort to attain that. If you wish to sign 15 merchants every month, set it as your goal and work towards attaining that.

2. Join the Right ISO Program: The merchant services agent program you join will determine your success. Look for an ISO agent program that provides both the tools and support needed to successfully run your business. Shaw Merchant Group is one of the top-rated ISO agent programs that you can join.

3. Understand Your Product: Ensuring that you understand your merchant products and services is important in helping you stay competitive. The ISO agent program you choose should be in the capacity to provide firsthand information about the credit card processing business. This will help you to stay up to date on selling merchant services and in-turn, attract merchant leads.

4. Manage Your Time: As an independent sales agent, it can be very difficult for you to stay committed to what you do. Remember that you are 100% responsible for your daily tasks. For you to succeed in merchant services, it is critical to stick to your schedule. Divide your time to tackle things such as following up with your leads and finding new leads. If you find it difficult to manage time by yourself, you can use apps and tools to schedule your daily tasks. This will improve your productivity and bring you a step close to making more money.

5. Invest In Referrals: Referrals are very important in helping you grow your merchant services business. This is very effective when starting out as a merchant service provider. Set a strategy to use and follow up with clients so as to get most referrals from every merchant client you get.

If you offer exceptional services, then your referral list will keep on growing. You will be getting new leads on a consistent basis.

With these above tips, it should be more clear for you to earn handsome amount of money.

The ball is in your court; you now know the amount you can make from your digital payments business. Remember that there is no limit to the amount of money you can make. Put in the effort, and you could possibly make millions in your digital payments business.