Card Payments: What Acceptance Involves for a Merchant

Card acceptance is the default payment method for most online businesses, and it is also the method with the most moving parts: an authorisation, a later capture, a settlement cycle, and a dispute right the cardholder keeps for months after paying.

Last reviewed September 2026

The lifecycle of one card payment

Authorisation: the issuer reserves the amount and approves or declines the request.
Capture: you confirm the amount to be taken, often at the point of shipping or delivery.
Settlement: your provider pays out the captured amount, less fees, on its own cycle.
Refund: money is returned as a separate transaction, not by cancelling the original one.
Dispute: the cardholder can ask their issuer to reverse the payment long after settlement.

Why the dispute right shapes underwriting

Because a cardholder can reverse a payment after you have been paid and after you have shipped, whoever settles you carries that exposure. That is why card acceptance involves underwriting at all, and why delivery timelines, subscription renewals and refund practice come up in questions that feel unrelated to payments.

Dispute levels are measured against thresholds set by the card schemes, and sustained breaches are the most common route to processing being restricted. Our chargeback ratio guide covers how the ratio is calculated.

What providers typically want to see

Company registration, ownership and the country you are established in.
The business model, your merchant category, and what the customer receives and when.
Processing history where it exists: volume, average transaction value, disputes, refunds.
Any licence or authorisation the activity requires.
A settlement account in the company's name, in a currency the route supports.

Where terms vary between routes

Settlement timing, reserve arrangements, supported settlement currencies and required documents differ by provider, and we do not treat any of them as a universal rule. Those are exactly the attributes the assessment surfaces per route, based on the information providers have given us.

Ecommerce

For standard retail ecommerce the deciding factors are authorisation rate, the local payment methods your markets expect, and settlement terms, usually in that order.

Subscriptions

For recurring billing the provider decision is mostly about retry logic, card-lifecycle tooling and authentication, those three drive more revenue than the headline processing rate.

iGaming

iGaming acceptance is decided almost entirely by licensing and player geography. Providers that support a Malta or Curaçao licensed operator are rarely the same ones that support a UK or Ontario facing brand.

United Kingdom

A UK company is straightforward to onboard for mainstream card acceptance, and the questions that decide the outcome are usually your sector, your trading history and where your customers are, rather than the country of registration itself.

Netherlands

A Dutch BV is a familiar profile for European acquirers, and the decisive practical question is usually not whether cards are available but whether your checkout supports iDEAL, which carries a large share of Dutch consumer payments.

SEPA Direct Debit

SEPA Direct Debit lets you pull euro payments from a customer's bank account under a mandate they have signed, which makes it well suited to recurring billing and poorly suited to anything where you need immediate certainty that the money will stay.

iDEAL

iDEAL is the dominant online payment method in the Netherlands and works as an authenticated bank transfer: the customer approves the payment inside their own banking app, and the payment is effectively final once approved.

Chargeback rate too high

A rising chargeback rate is the most common reason processing is restricted or withdrawn, and because schemes measure it monthly against your transaction count, it can cross a threshold faster than most merchants expect.

No processing history

Without statements to review, an underwriter has to assess your plan rather than your track record, so the questions shift to what you sell, when the customer receives it, and whether your volume expectations are credible.

Chargeback ratio

Chargeback ratio is the number of chargebacks in a month divided by the transactions or volume in that period, expressed as a percentage. It is the metric acquirers watch most closely, because card schemes place merchants above their thresholds into monitoring programmes with fees and remediation requirements.

What is a merchant account?

A merchant account is an account held with an acquiring bank that allows you to accept card payments and receive settlement. It is not a business bank account: funds pass through it, are netted against refunds, fees and any reserve, and are then paid out to your ordinary bank account.

MCC codes

A merchant category code is a four-digit code that classifies what your business sells. Your acquirer assigns it during onboarding, and it influences interchange, whether issuers approve your transactions, and which acquiring programmes you are eligible for.

Check which payment routes may fit your business

Answer a short set of questions about your business and we will check your profile against the requirements providers have given us. No approval is decided here.

Start assessment

Nothing is shared with a provider until you submit your onboarding pack. Approval is always the provider's decision.