Five Key Considerations of a Payment Integration
The link between businesses and consumers is based on simple logic. The easier the payment experience, the faster a business gets paid. In a fast-paced work environment, a merchant’s ability to adapt to the ever-changing needs of consumers’ payment preferences is vital.
Today, ecommerce, mobile, and contactless payment solutions are more in-demand than ever before. However, one consumer’s preferred payment method may not appeal to the next. Therefore, businesses need to identify the payment preferences of all their customers and design effective payment solutions to meet their needs. It is best to give your customers multiple ways to make a payment.
Before deciding the payment options best for a business, remember that not all solutions are created equal. Here are some things to consider when expanding payment methods:
1. Mobile Payments
Mobile payments allow a person to conduct business anytime and make for a better customer experience. By combining mobile payments with text messaging, which more businesses are doing than ever, merchants can interact with customers. This promotes a greater sense of trust, added customer loyalty, customer retention, and repeat purchases.
2. Recurring Payments
If your business collects membership fees, subscription fees, or offers special pricing to loyalty program enrollees, you will want to find a payment solution that supports recurring billing. Recurring payment plans make collecting fees fast, increase revenue, and make a business stand out from competitors that haven’t caught up to the Card on File momentum.
3. Explore New Options – Pay By Text
Using a solution like Pay By Text makes purchasing easier and more secure than ever before. The Pay By Text solution, paired with the two-way messaging functionality, would enable any business to send invoices and accept payments through the most convenient modern communication medium: the mobile number. A robust payment engagement platform will allow businesses to send personalized, auto-scheduled text message reminders for amounts due and allow consumers to automatically renew subscriptions by text. These modern conveniences optimize revenue streams by making payments easier and businesses more accessible to customers.
4. Card Processing: Payment Providers vs. Payment Aggregators
Well-known payment aggregators like PayPal, Stripe, or Square can be attractive to businesses that rely on instant onboarding with minimal documentation. The downside of processing through a big aggregator is that an account can be shut down for minor missteps that each aggregator defines with little or no notice to the business.
Payment service providers are not free of restrictions but tend to be much more lenient than big aggregators. Many can offer extremely fast onboarding, much lower processing fees, more flexible integration options, multiple payment methods and innovative payment technology that the bigger companies have not yet implemented.
5. What to Look for in a Payment Provider
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for all businesses. Your choice of payment provider should directly relate to the business needs and processing volume. Three crucial questions to ask are:
- How many transactions are actively processed each month?
- How many transactions do you want to process each month? (Goal)
- How important are certain features compared to others, such as ease of integration, invoicing options, security, etc.?
- What Works for Your Business Model and Its Customers?
- What works for one business may not be a fit for another. Consider things like transaction volumes, speed, and revenue potential. It all boils down to having the proper combination of technology that gives customers the payment method options they want while suiting your business model at the same time.
Bottom line, businesses should seek a payments option that offers the best processing rates, chargeback protection, and faster market entry that is also diversified for every kind of customer.
