Five Reasons to Consider Changing Your Payments Provider

Why consider switching merchant/payment gateway partners? What are the benefits? There are several. To make it easy, we’ve highlighted the top five reasons:

• High Processing Fees: Watching your processing costs go up with each new monthly account statement is one of the most common reasons for merchants to leave their current provider and switch to a competitor. Bundled rate pricing, such as that offered by Square brings a measure of predictability to your processing costs and usually don’t rise over time. However, bundled rate pricing actually becomes too expensive as your business grows over time. Once your business reaches a certain processing volume (usually around $5,000 per month), bundled rate pricing will cost you more than cost-plus pricing, even when you factor in the additional monthly and annual fees that come with a full-service merchant account.

• Customer Support: There have been many consolidations in the merchant/gateway space with large providers. All of the Agents/ISOs and gateway partners that had relationships with the individual entities are now in the process of assimilating any new pricing, and more importantly, adapting to new customer care and reporting entities. With this change, comes potential upheaval including deteriorating support and increased gateway and merchant fees. It will be much easier to work with a company that is focused on the customer’s business and not inwardly focused on the consolidation of their own business. In addition, with the consolidation of large providers, it may be easy for small and medium businesses to get lost in the shuffle. Attention that the smaller businesses normally require and expect may not be provided given the focus of the company.

• One Point of Accountability: Combining a customer’s merchant and gateway partner into a single payment service provider (PSP) has its distinctive advantages. Any type of processing or payment issue is triaged by the same support infrastructure. No longer is there a need to create tickets with multiple service desks in order to resolve a problem. Often times, either provider may point the finger that the problem resides with the other. Having one point of contact streamlines the process and provides the most seamless, effective and quickest resolution to all issues.

• Account Updater: If a gateway is used for recurring payments, it should provide automated account updating — making sure that customers are not lost, and the customer experience is not interrupted.

• Level III Processing: A gateway should also be able to automatically detect payments by corporate credit cards and purchasing cards as fees associated with those cards are eligible for lower rates. At Payway, Level III Processing is automated for all clients – right from the start – to reduce as many interchange fees possible for the duration of our partnership.

If the gateway provides a virtual terminal, and an optional Point-to-Point Device that encrypts the credit card number  (P2PE) prior to entering it into the gateway, it will significantly reduce the scope and cost of annual PCI (Payment Card Industry) audits.

Also, when changing a partner, customers can now check to see if there is a reserve (untouchable money set aside for chargebacks) as part of the original merchant agreement. If there is a proven track record of creditworthiness, it’s possible to ask for a refund of this reserve. If a provider will not consider this, it’s possible a new provider won’t require a reserve based on your current financial condition. As the economy continues to grow so does a client’s credit card sales volume. As a merchant’s sales increase, so do the costs associated with accepting credit cards. It is always important to review costs during a booming economy, so profits don’t get absorbed in fees.

A new partner will bring many of these fresh consultative approaches to a merchant’s business. They will also review new products and solutions, such as a virtual terminal or a mobile device in addition to a stand-alone terminal.

With all the changes in the industry, now is the right time to consider changing a merchant/gateway partner. Why wait?