Forum

Merchant Application On Ebay
 

For those of you who viewed my first post, please disregard it. I found the info I needed on that particular merchant provider. But something I havent been able to find an answer to on these boards, in the book, or anywhere else is how to get a merchant account of any kind approved using a stealth name. This is all very new to me, and Ive been reading a TON, so Im not just posting this randomly without any effort on my part.

The plan is to open, slowly, 2 or 3 stealth accounts using variations of my name. So my first question (which I realize isnt really a merchant one) is this:

Will Ebay be able to cross-reference my information using name variants? My suspended account was registered under my full name. Will they be able to trace me with a variant of my first & middle name along with the same last name, even with different addresses, phone numbers, IPs etc? I need to maintain my last name for the sake of a merchant account.

Which brings me to question 2: When getting a merchant account linked to Ebay, what exactly is the process? Ive read over on the PayPal Sucks board that its all done online and simply a matter of entering your gateway info. No phonecalls or anything. However, the book makes reference to faxing in documents. If I needed to do that. wont those documents have my SSN on them? One poster on the other board said when EB asked for this info, they called their merchant and they took care of it for them saying EB does this randomly. But again, even in this case, wont my SSN be given to EBay (or even an old address in their database)?

I want to do this right the first time and thats why Im asking here. Ive never used a merchant account before and it seems like the only true way for me to avoid the whole 200/20K issue is to go with one. (I sell small items, last year doing over 1700 individual sales. To stealth that all out on multiple EB/PP setups would be a nightmare!)

Thanks in advance for any help!!