Today The Official Merchant Services Blog will focus on an exclusive deal offered to merchants by Host Merchant Services, a second year of the Discover “On Us” plan, formerly the Add Discover On Discover promotion. 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 and exciting. It essentially gives qualifying merchants a year of being able to process Discover payments at no cost. Discover “On Us” 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 Discover “On Us” 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 anytime before December 31st, 2013.
- Confirm your enrollment with a required test transaction.
- Update signage at your retail store (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.
Durbin Amendment Works For This Too
In fact, one of the features of the Durbin Amendment can help Discover get added hype and promotional assistance from this Discover “On Us” plan. As Host Merchant Services pointed out in their Durbin 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 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 lasts until December 31, 2013. The Discover “On Us” Program will extend 12 months of free Discover processing to merchants who qualify, even if implemented on December 31st, 2013, the merchant would be able to utilize the program through December 31st, 2014. If you are interested in finding out more about it, feel free to Contact Host Merchant Services.
