Some payment gateways will allow you to connect 2 separate merchant accounts so you can achieve a balance of sales known as Load Balancing.

Today I’ll go over why you might need this, and tell you how it works and give you one really important reminder when setting up a load balancing payment gateway account!

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So to start, what is Load Balancing? 

It is the process of spreading the credit card sales amongst 2 different merchant accounts, while utilizing one payment gateway that is often attached to one checkout page or order form. 

The types of businesses that would use a load balancing payment gateway are often ecommerce businesses with high amount of sales, both lots of transactions and lots of volume, as well as companies that fall into a high risk category. 

Spreading the sales among 2 different merchant accounts historically has meant that the risk for the bank goes down, thus making it easier for a high risk business to keep selling. 

So having a balance of sales was sort of a way to hedge against potential problems like getting merchant account shut down from a spike in sales for example. 

Load balancing won’t apply to you if your business is low risk or low volume so if you’ve found this video because you’re doing research on payment gateways and which one you should use, check the links in the description where you can click to schedule a consultation with myself and my team to discuss your needs specific to a merchant account and payment gateway. 

If you’re not quite sure if you’re high risk, again, check the links for a list of high risk industries so you can cross reference your company. 

Conceptually, here’s how it works. 

With online sales, you have an order form, or a checkout page that is integrated with a payment gateway. 

Every time a customer visits your order form and makes a purchase, the payment gateway jumps into action and does it’s job, which is to facilitate authorization and approval of the transaction, 

With a load balancing gateway, you have merchant account #1 and merchant account #2 and visually it would look sort of like this. 

When the customer clicks the “Submit” button on the order from, the gateway automatically sends every other transaction to the opposite merchant account. 

So it just rotates back and forth, on every other transaction, thus evenly spreading the load and balancing it.  Hence, the payment gateway load balancing.

And that’s it. 

It’s pretty straightforward actually. 

Reminder: 

When setting up the account, you  want to work with a company that will be able to facilitate the setup of both of the merchant accounts and properly disclose to each bank and merchant account provider that you intend to set up a load balancing account. 

The reason very simply is that some merchant providers don’t allow you to have a 2nd merchant account and if they find out you do, it COULD be a violation of the terms of service on your account. 

If you want to talk about a load balancing payment gateway account, click here to schedule a free consultation with Brian and his team.