A merchant account can allow your business to boost its sales. How? Very simple - a merchant account will allow your business to accept other types of payments besides cash. Sooner or later, you are going to want to accept credit cards and checks for your business as most people prefer paying for items in this manner. If you want to do this, you need to have some sort of clearing house for the credit card payments. While you can take a risk and deposit checks into your bank account, you cannot do the same for credit card payments. Therefore, you need a merchant account to facilitate the transaction. By accepting credit card sales, you can boost your sales by offering customers yet another convenient way to pay.