Online Merchant Services

                                       THE PLASTIC DOMINATED GLOBAL MARKET

Online merchant services are services that enable you to process credit card payments from your customers. It is a special account tied to a credit card processor that works with your customer's bank to help route payments into your bank account. They include but are not limited to

•       Credit and debit cards payment processing

•       Check guarantee and check conversion services

•       Automated Clearing House check drafting services

•       Gift and loyalty card programs

•       Payment gateway

•       Email Marketing

•       Direct Mail Marketing

•       Merchant Cash Advances

•       Online Ordering Systems

•       Point of Sale Systems

Swipe fees are passed on to businesses as part of their credit card processing agreement with their merchant services to make up for their fraud prevention costs and processing fees. These have been reduced by almost 50% in the US for Visa and MasterCard debit cards since October 2011. Card processing costs are often a merchant’s second highest expense after labor, so lower swipe fees for debit cards are a welcome development, since the cards have grown in popularity with consumers, surpassing both checks and credit cards. The fastest growing market overall is international debit cards. International debit card volumes grew at a nearly 30% compounded annual rate, from 2007 to 2011. The slowest market growth overall is occurring in US credit cards. In fact, between Visa and MasterCard credit cards, the market contracted at a 1.7% compounded annual rate, from 2007 to 2011, whereas it grew at 13% for the same period for debit cards. As may be surmised, online merchant services have become a part of daily life.

What you are looking for is a versatile, reliable credit card processing service that can help your business increase sales by enabling you to accept all forms of payment from anywhere at anytime. With a first-rate credit card processing service, you can:

Accept all Forms of Payment

Accept Payments Anywhere

Get Fraud and Security Protection

It's hard to determine which credit card processing solution is best for your business. For a merchant account comparison, you also need to look at:

Average Approval Rating
Cost per Month
Start-Up Cost
Account Setup Time
Customer Service

Internet Based Features.

POS/ Swipers Features

In today's marketplace, retailers simply must accept debit and credit cards to survive. Electronic transactions have replaced cash as the primary method to accept credit cards in highly developed countries economies. Merchant account services allow these transactions to take place; therefore, if you don't have a merchant account, you cannot accept credit or debit card payments. If you can't accept these payments, your business cannot survive in the modern economy. Merchant services are not just for accepting credit and debit cards. The best services allow you to accept multiple forms of payment, including electronic and paper checks, money orders and traveler's checks. Some even allow you to turn your smartphone or tablet into a mobile cash register so you can accept payments literally anywhere if you have a cellular or Wi-Fi connection. 

The best merchant account providers are those that meet your specific needs. 

Literary Rainas

Vitasta's Antecedents

Vitasta's father, Pramathesh (Tisha) Raina was one year behind me in School in 1956. Tisha and I joined the National Defence Academy together and have been crossing each other's path since then. Tisha's elder brother, Suresh, was my classmate in School and College. I missed Tisha's wedding-he married another friend's sister. I've seen V as a kid and look where she is today! I'm proud of her and for her parents. 

Vitasta's grandfather, Pandit Trilokinath Raina, who I called Baikash after the death of my father, was Uncle Raina to me in my childhood, right up to 1967, when I joined the NDA. Thereafter, he was 'Sir', one of our English teachers. Tisha's mother has always been my surrogate mother, more so after my mother died in 1983. Sadly, they are no more.

I am the proud possessor of an autographed Pandit Trilokinath Raina's masterpiece, "An Anthology of Modern Kashmiri Poetry", published in 1976. 

Vitasta's book,'Writer's Block' is available at Amazon for $5.34 and all family members, friends and course mates can get it from her father for just Rs.99.00. Go pick up a copy of her book. He is at pramatheshraina@hotmail.com

Who is Vitasta Raina?

 WRITER'S BLOCK by VITASTA RAINA

'Writer's Block' is a novella which imposes upon its reader all the physical forces that Chalet, the fictional city, represents; there is pressure from all sides, from the strictly delineated social class system to the acronym-ridden bureaucracy, and above all we are pressed by the the sensation of the sheer quantity of human life contained within an urban enclosure. The populace of Chalet is teeming and we are drawn into the milieu by the denizens of the Writer's Block, and it is through the collection of writers, artists, philosophers and diarists that we understand the middle ground between the rich and the degraded poor, that is to say, we understand that humanity has somehow been lost among the crush of buildings and bodies.


Vitasta Raina writes with an canniness as she describes a city in which equality does not reign, an awareness of the power of the class system to dehumanize. Her writing is forceful, yet dreamy in places, clever with a wry humour. Her personification of Chalet is particularly striking--Chalet as a festering body, as a victim, as a matriarch.

'Writer's Block' is not so much a fantasy, for it is far too possible to be that; instead it hangs somewhere in the realm of speculative or dystopian fiction, appealing as it does to the cynic in us all, the cynic who suspects that a city like Chalet might actually exist, that there might be a class of people who do not wish to see poverty in their playgrounds. And this, perhaps, is what allows us to sympathize with the denizens of the Writer's Block as they remark that it is 'Quite sinister, really'.

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