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.

High-Risk Merchants Benefit From New Chargeback Disputes

VCR helps merchants improve chargeback disputes

It’s no surprise that many high-risk merchants face a constant stream of chargeback disputes throughout the lifetime of their online business. High-risk merchant account owners know this is based on customer behavior, not actual business practices. However, recent changes made to Visa’s Visa Claims Resolution (VCR) make it simpler to deal with credit card fraud.   […]

The Cheat Sheet On Merchant Account Reserves (And How To Lower Them)

Merchant account reserves are a set amount of settlements set aside from high-risk merchants and startup businesses with no processing history pay to their card processor.

Merchant account reserves are a term you’ve likely heard of due to being categorized as high risk. As such, you’ve probably learned it means you hand a percentage of your sales to your card processor, but do you know why? Merchants already deal with a lot of stresses in the ecommerce industry including running day-to-day operations, […]

8 Ways Affiliate Traffic Might Hurt Your Merchant Account

Affiliate managers can recruit new partners, motivate existing ones and negotiate better ad placement for your brand.

You depend on your merchant account for credit card processing and you depend on your affiliate program to supply you with affiliate traffic. However, if you aren’t careful your affiliate traffic could affect your merchant account in a bad way unintentionally. What are the signs your affiliate traffic stinks? The biggest signs you might be […]

High Chargebacks? Lower Them To Avoid Merchant Account Termination (Pt. 2)

High Chargebacks? Lower Them To Avoid Merchant Account Termination (Pt. 1)

High chargebacks ruining your business? Last week we published part one of blog and provided some great strategies to prevent chargebacks from terminating your merchant account. Well, we have more great tips to help you avoid an online business disaster, so here is part two. Is your help desk or customer support page helping? The […]

High Chargebacks? Lower Them To Avoid Merchant Account Termination (Pt. 1)

High Chargebacks? Lower Them To Avoid Merchant Account Termination (Pt. 1)

For 10 years DirectPayNet has been advising merchants on various payment related topics and the most common question is about chargebacks. We get asked, “What can I do to lower my chargebacks and refunds?” There are some simple things you can do to help reduce chargebacks and fraud in your merchant account, but it’s not […]