Author: Maria Sparagis

Maria Sparagis is President of DirectPayNet, where she's spent over 20 years helping businesses scale to six-, seven-, and eight-figure revenue through optimized payment processing. She works hands-on with business owners to solve merchant account challenges, reduce processing costs, and implement payment strategies that support real growth. Maria is a regular speaker at fintech conferences and writes about practical approaches that help businesses break through revenue plateaus.

How to Secure the Best Credit Card Processing for Your Skincare Business

Business has been booming for online skincare retailers. It’s yet another one of those industries that has benefitted from the outbreak of the pandemic. But nutraceutical skincare businesses are still considered high-risk by payment processors. Worse, many payment service providers are refusing to work with merchants selling skincare products. With that in mind, let’s take a […]

FAQ Friday: How can I Avoid Getting Ripped Off By Merchant Account Fees?

On a recent episode of the Uncensored Direct Marketing podcast, my guest Julian Reyes brought up how easy it is for agents like us to rip off business owners with confusing merchant services pricing. He said that dozens of agents liked to operate in a cloud of obscurity, and it wasn’t until much later that he realized that he […]

Merchant Accounts in Puerto Rico: Everything You Need to Know Before Making the Move

We get it; you want to move your business to Puerto Rico to take advantage of advantageous tax breaks and the year-round sun, sea, and sand! But you need to understand that you can’t take your merchant accounts with you. While business owners can move over to Puerto Rico pretty seamlessly, setting up payment processing […]

After Targeting Gamestop, Blackberry, Nokia, and AMC Is Cryptocurrency Next on the Hit List for WallStreetBets?

It was has been one of the craziest weeks on Wall Street. A rag-tag bunch of Redditors who spend their time on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets has inflicted billion of losses for leading hedge funds such as Melvin Captial. The so-called “short squeeze” saga has drawn international attention, typified by billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s […]

FAQ Friday: How Many Merchant Accounts Can I Have?

Many business owners in high-risk verticals make the mistake of thinking you can only have one merchant account per business. But this is simply not true. When we informed a nutraceutical business owner shut down by Stripe, he could have had several merchant accounts he couldn’t believe it. “So I could have been routing my […]