Today The Official Merchant Services Blog gives the floor exclusively to Host Merchant Services. The topic being Partnerships and what the company offers with its partnership programs.

What are Partnership Programs?

The bulk of the payment processing providers out there offer individual services directly to merchants and their specific businesses. Host Merchant Services, the premier provider of payment processing and e-commerce services for small businesses and medium businesses, goes beyond just the vanilla suite of services –– providing custom partnership packages for niche market clients.

What this means is that Host Merchant Services will partner with a business to help that business provide payment processing services to the customers of that business. That’s the basics of the partnership, but the power of the partnership is expressed in how the focus of the partnership can shift for the business in question.

Host Merchant Services can customize a partnership package in three different tiers of online shopping and e-commerce services:

1. A package made directly for a web hosting company so that they can in turn offer services for their customers who all have online shopping sites in some shape or form.
2. A package made for a web site designer that can combine with their design business so they can offer their customers a seamless site with strong design and payment processing options right from the day its ready to launch.
3. A package made for the end-user specifically set up for a customer that has an online shopping experience set up and is ready to integrate payment processing.

Host Merchant Services Expertise

This customizable and flexible series of partnership packages are based on the experience that Host Merchant Services has in both industries –– company CEO Lou Honick launched HostMySite.com in 1997 which grew to be a successful web hosting company, and company CFO Dan Honick has decades of experience working in the payment processing industry. Combining that much experience in both aspects of the industry has given Host Merchant Services its unique partnership program’s foundation.

Web Hosting Partnerships

Host Merchant Services began an initiative to provide web hosting companies a fast and transparent third party solution for processing credit cards. This initiative is the core of their partnership program offering. And to date, the company has partnered with these various hosting companies:

• Singlehop
• imSMB
• Gearhost
• Edge Web Hosting
• HostMySite.com

You can find out more information for each individual partnership here. And you can find out about the details of the Web Hosting partnership package here.

A Bit of a Homecoming

The most recent addition to the list was HostMySite.com. It’s a bit of a homecoming for Host Merchant Services CEO Lou Honick, who originally founded the company in 1997. You can read a full press release about the partnership here.

The Other Customized Packages

Beyond just the partnerships custom built for web hosting companies, Host Merchant Services offers solutions for web designers and web site owners. You can find information on those options at these links:

• Web Designer Partnership
• Web Site Owner Partnership

The thrust of these partnerships is to create the payment processing package that makes it easiest for the partner’s customers. Host Merchant Services plan is to do the heavy lifting for the company making payment processing a seamless, worry-free addition to the services they already offer their customer. They also contain value added features, such as additional telemarketing services provided by Host Merchant Services for their partner company to their customers, to give each partner extra insight into what their customers need.

What the Partnerships Offer

Each partnership has a set of basic services that Host Merchant Services can provide:

• A fully designed portal site customized to your specific company.
• Increased revenue as your customers can now utilize HMS processing services through your portal site.
• Savings for your own company through our processing services.
• Access to the gateways and technologies we support for e-commerce, including HMSExpress, Transaction Central, and authorize.net.
• Assistance integrating the gateway into your website, your customers’ websites, or your shopping cart.

Building off of that base of services, Host Merchant Services tweaks and customizes each package to suit the individual partner. The company adds extra marketing services, SEO analysis and integrated telemarketing for partners that are interested.