This news can really harm your potential sales, customer satisfaction levels, and affect your business in a million ways. If you’ve found yourself in this position, take a deep breath and figure out what’s the best way to proceed. You will need to pin point what put you in this situation in the first place, and then identify what steps you need to take to fix it. Believe it or not, there is a light at the end of this tunnel.However, it is possible that notice of a merchant account shutdown has come completely out of the blue and the most important action plan you can take is to find a new payment processor as soon as possible to avoid any potential damage to your business.

Why Was Your Merchant Account Closed?

Typically, the reason a merchant account is closed might be because of one of these reasons:

Suspicious activity – There are several ways merchants might choose to breach the terms of their merchant processing agreement. The reasons might be due to depositing transactions on behalf of another merchant or maintaining multiple merchant accounts (acquirers usually require merchants to refrain from simultaneously having active accounts with other acquirers).
Fraud – Understandably, if there’s any kind of fraud involved (misuse of credit card information, fraudulent transactions, failure to deliver merchandise, overcharging customers, etc.), the acquirer will terminate the account.
Chargebacks– This is easily the main and most common reason for merchant account shutdowns. Businesses that have recorded too many chargebacks are highlighted by merchant service providers as “high risk” and potentially run the risk of having their services shut off. If chargebacks amount to even just 1% of your total charges, this could be an easy reason for a shutdown.
What to Do If Your Merchant Account Is Shutdown suddenly?
Here are few points that might help you restart:

1. Dig and ask a lot of questions about why the termination happened:
Merchants shouldn’t always assume they understand the reasoning for the account cancellation. It’s important and it’s your right to know the truth. Also, merchants will have to provide a written statement from their previous acquirer when applying for a new merchant account.

Request Your Statements From The Shutdown Merchant Account:
You have to provide statements for the last six months for your closed merchant account. Try to access these when you can still log in to the online reporting system. If your access to online reporting has been restricted, you can request for statement for the terminated account.

Be honest and compliant:
Keep in mind that every acquirer will scrutinize and drill a new merchant this is even more true for one that previously had a merchant account cancelled. So be sure you are compliant and clear with every aspect of a new agreement. In addition, it’s always best to be honest with a new acquirer. Keep them posted about past indiscretions right away and avoid sacrificing their trust.

Fill out all of the required paperwork:
Do it promptly and provide all of the requested supporting documentation. Never complain about how much paperwork you are asked to supply and how time-consuming it is to go through it all — we know! If there is a way to simplify the process, PSP would have done it long ago, as PSP’s also don’t like dealing with more paperwork than they have to.

5. Maybe you need professional help!
Don’t be ashamed to seek help. A terminated merchant account maybe a evidence of insufficient chargeback management techniques. Merchants who don’t seek help the second time around are mostly the ones who tend to repeat their same mistakes.

Seek out a new acquirer:
If you’ve found that you have been placed on the MATCH List, it’s true that this is a very real obstacle to overcome. But it’s not impossible. You should be aware that financial institutions will not work with you if your merchant account has been terminated. Your best option is to turn to a high risk provider, like IPayTotal, for a high risk merchant account. We are here to help!