Posted on

Why You Should Consider BAMS Over Stripe

Online Payment

You have a choice when it comes to deciding upon the right payment processing solution for your business. A choice that is undoubtedly met with a wide variety number of options.

As credit card and digital wallet usage continues to accelerate, it’s important that you partner with a platform that does more than just work in the here and now. It should be able to scale with your business and counter every bump along the road. It should function as part of the bigger picture, working cohesively alongside your other adopted solutions.

For those in ecommerce, this proves even more important as you manage the infrastructure needed to secure customer data and allow your business to thrive. When making your decision, here’s why you should consider BAMS over Stripe.

Solutions Tailored to Fit Your Business

Every business is unique, functioning off its own set of standards, goals, and customer needs. At BAMS, this factors into our innovative pricing model.

Instead of boxing customers in at cookie-cutter pricing levels, we customize quotes upfront during our 5-step price comparison consultation. In doing so, we’re able to determine everything a business needs (and doesn’t) to be successful, saving you money while ensuring fast and easy setup.

Dedicated Support

With 185 Google reviews with an average of 4.9/5 stars, it’s no secret that our support team is one-of-a-kind. Since day one, we’ve been putting merchants first with customer care that is anything but generic.

There will never be roundabout ‘Help’ portals to navigate. And you won’t need to review redundant information with different reps during every phone call you make to our team. When working with BAMS, you’ll be assigned a dedicated representative that you can reach out to at any time with questions or concerns regarding your specific account.

Seamless Integrations

It’s one thing for a payment processor to work well on its own. It’s another for it to work just as well alongside your business’ other tools and services.

Unlike Stripe, BAMS supports both CNP and CP accounts. If you work in different environments, this allows you to keep operations integrated under one umbrella. With integrative capabilities across a wide variety of e-commerce platforms, BAMS’ agents will have your online store connected to our payment gateway in no time.

Secure Agreements

Stripe is what’s referred to as a ”payment facilitator”. This means that when using their services, your agreement goes directly through their company, allowing them to hold money and cancel accounts easily at their discretion.

In comparison, your relationship with BAMS is backed by a bank. You can trust that your data will remain secure and services in place, pending any outstanding circumstances.

Final Thoughts: Why You Should Consider BAMS Over Stripe

At BAMS, we believe that our customers are more than just a number. They’re businesses — just like ours — and the owners behind them have visions and hopes for the future that we love to support.

It’s our job to help you realize those end goals with quality service and support at every stage of the journey. Learn more about what makes us a leader in payment processing and request your free quote today!

Posted on

Why Chargeback Defense Is Important?

Chargeback Defense

There are only so many parts of running a business that you can prepare for. Like many aspects of life, it’s difficult to truly understand what it takes to be a successful business owner until you’re in the thick of it.

For example, one thing that no one tells you about starting a business is just how problematic chargebacks can be to an owner’s bottom line. Individually, these fees may not add up to much, but when underestimated and mismanaged, they can end up costing you big time.

When searching for the right payment processing solutions for your business, consider the importance of chargeback defense.

What Are Chargeback Fees?

In the simplest of terms, a chargeback is a forced transaction reversal initiated by a cardholder’s bank. If a customer feels dissatisfied with a product or service, or that a charge was fraudulent in some way, they are able to contact their bank and essentially request a refund.

Upon doing so, this will set into motion action taken by the cardholder’s bank to verify their claims before removing funds from a merchant’s account to put back in the customer’s.

Chargebacks were put in place as a sort of checkpoint, protecting consumers from fraudulent situations. However, nowadays it’s a “friendly fraud” practice that has been abused and overused for all the wrong reasons, such as buyer’s remorse, wanting to make a return after a businesses’ policy has expired and more.

Depending on the bank issuing the chargeback, fees associated with the transferring of money can vary from $20 to $100. Added up over time, these added costs chip away at your profits and make it much more difficult for you to focus on other aspects of building a business that will prove crucial for long term success.

How to Reduce Chargeback Fees

Reducing chargeback fees and requests starts with having proper chargeback defense solutions working in conjunction with your payment processing system. The following are tools to consider for helping your business mitigate fraud.

Easily Manage Disputes

One of the issues with chargebacks is how often they fly under the radar. Often times, many business owners won’t know they’ve been hit with one until after the fact, which can be incredibly frustrating.

BAMS offers peace of mind with chargeback defense tools like Instant Dispute Alerts and Online Dispute Management. Not only will you be made knowledgeable of chargeback disputes as they’re filed, but you’ll also have the opportunity to fight back from one convenient location. All of which certainly beats having to rely on postal mail and customer support lines.

Go on the Chargeback Defense with Fraud Protection

In partnership with services like Verif and Signifyd, BAMS helps stop chargebacks before they happen. The less time you have to spend reviewing and flagging every dispute that comes your way, the more time you can dedicate to your business’ developing reputation and growth.

Final Thoughts: Why Chargeback Defense is Important

Every sale matters. Protect your business with chargeback defense solutions you can trust. Contact BAMS today for a free price comparison and quote!

Posted on

All About Our Low Price Guarantee

Low Price Guarantee

In the day-to-day grind as a business owner, you’re in a constant state of juggling. Whether it’s managing staff, approving new products, marketing an event, or one of a hundred other things piled up on your to do list, there’s no shortage of tasks vying for your attention.

It probably comes as no surprise then that of the roughly 400,000 small businesses launched within the U.S. every year, 20% of them fail before those first 12 months are through. For many businesses, especially those on the smaller side, there simply aren’t enough resources to remain both efficient and profitable long term.

One area where many businesses stumble is with regards to financing. There is either too little capital to keep efforts afloat or the money that does exist is mismanaged — potentially a combination of both.

Across any number of industries — ecommerce, restaurants, non-profits, and healthcare — it can be easy to overlook just how quickly the cost of payment processing can add up. And yet, even with knowledge of those costs, it’s not something that can simply be eliminated.

As the industry leader in payment processing, we understand the frustration that can arise from hidden fees and chargebacks. That’s why we’ve developed a unique 5-step price comparison process to ensure our low price guarantee is always met.

How Our 5-Step Price Comparison Process Works

When you request a quote from BAMS, you’re requesting a personalized analysis of your current payment processing set up. Using your current merchant statement, we’ll piece through a detailed summary of fees paid to major credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard, your deposit summary, transaction count, and more.

Step 1: Review Your Classification

You’d be surprised how many processors fail to understand a business upon set-up only to classify them under the wrong industry. When this happens, you’re likely to lose out on money in the long run. Before we dive into the finer details, we’ll make sure your classification lines up with your business for the sake of maximizing future savings.

Step 2: Uncover Hidden Fees

Hidden fees and price increases may not seem like a lot up front, but they certainly add up over time. We’ll run a side-by-side comparison of your current payment processing system and BAMS to highlight which costs can be minimized, if not completely eliminated, upon migrating over.

Step 3: Check the Fine Print for Updated Regulations

The regulatory environment that governs payments and payment processing is ever-changing and muddled with fine print. We take into account the most current pricing regulations to ensure that you’re not paying more than you should at any point in time.

Step 4: Examine How You Accept Payments

How you process customer transactions is about more than just the credit cards you accept. Often times, the point of sale (POS) terminal or payment gateway can be at fault for negatively impacting your bottom line. Our analysts take all of this into account when generating a plan around your business’ current situation and future needs.

Step 5: Give You a Quote

With all of the above laid out, reviewed, and analyzed, it’s time for a quote. The BAMS team will show you exactly how our system compares to that of your current setup, with feature recommendations that cater to the exact needs of your business and your business alone.

Final Thoughts: All About Our Low Price Guarantee

When it comes to running a business, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to doing it right. But there are services you can trust to ensure that the most important areas of your operation run as smoothly as possible.

If it’s time to rethink your current payment processing service! Contact us today to take advantage of our low price guarantee. Request a free analysis and quote.

 

Posted on

Why BAMS Is The Perfect Solution For Your E-commerce Business?

E-commerce Business

Over the past decade, the world of e-commerce has completely transformed consumer purchasing behaviors. Practically everything you once had to procure in-person can now be purchased from the convenience of your couch through a series of clicks, taps, and confirmation emails.

In fact, 1.79 billion people worldwide made a purchase online in 2018, with that number expected to grow to 2.14 billion by 2021. The moral of the story: your customers are shopping online with money that’s burning a hole in their pocket.

As an online business, putting the right e-commerce strategy in place is and will continue to be key for long-term growth. Part of that strategy relies on selecting the right payment processing solution for your website.

You will, without a doubt, have a multitude of merchant account providers to choose from, so it’s important to know what matters most to your business when making a selection.

You’re not simply choosing a method with which to process transactions: you’re giving customers a sense of security and your business a positive reputation.

Trust in a platform that will ensure all of the above, and then some. Here’s why BAMS is the perfect solution for your e-commerce business.

BAMS Integrates With Your Existing E-Commerce Software

The last thing you want to have to do when choosing a merchant account is completely reconfiguring your current system. Convenience goes out the window when you have to change out all of your e-commerce software and point-of-sale systems already in use.

The team at BAMS knows how important popular integrations are for business owners with full plates. The more consolidated your efforts become from a software standpoint, the more strategic you’re able to be in your day-to-day operations.

With a checkout process already in place, BAMS easily integrates with popular e-commerce platforms like Authorize.Net, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Best of all, BAMS agents take care of the heavy lifting, connecting your current online store to the ideal payment gateway solution for your e-commerce business.

BAMS Protects Against Chargebacks

Chargebacks, on average, cost e-commerce businesses $40 billion in lost revenue. This is largely due to the fact that most business owners don’t even notice a chargeback until it’s already been processed.

With additional fees tacked onto the customer’s refund, you can end up losing more than simply the cost of a returned product. This becomes especially true as your chargeback rate starts to rise. When an increasing number of customers dispute purchases with your business, refund processing fees from issuing banks start to rise and your ability to process credit cards in the future can become compromised.

The Chargeback Defense functionality offered through BAMS gives you the ability to manage chargebacks effectively. From Instant Dispute Alerts to Online Dispute Management tools, you have the power to review and refute claims as soon as they arise.

BAMS Streamlines Operations With Reporting & Analytics Dashboards

Running a business is one thing: growing a business is something else entirely. To do so requires you to separate yourself from the day-to-day and think big picture. It requires you to pull insights from reporting and analytics.

This is where BAMS goes beyond payment processing to provide you with software that actually works to maximize profitability. Working with BAMS, you’ll gain access to a powerful CRM portal that gives you visibility into daily operational highlights.

Set up daily settlement reports that can be received via email or SMS. Track sales growth trends with an easy-to-use, visual monitoring dashboard. Search through your entire history of transactional records in seconds. All of this functionality and more is at your fingertips in one centralized location.

BAMS Pricing is Transparent

The team at BAMS knows you have options when it comes to payment processing for e-commerce. This is why we’re both competitive and transparent when it comes to pricing.

Our pricing model involves a unique 5-step comparison process. When you request a quote, you receive an analysis specific to the needs of your e-commerce business. This starts with an in-depth look at the rates and fees you’re currently paying.

If there’s a way to save you money and better serve your payment processing needs, our team of Merchant Account Specialists will uncover it. After all, you shouldn’t have to pay for tools that aren’t actually effective or relevant to how your business operates.

This belief carries into the BAMS Low Price Guarantee. Receive a less expensive merchant account offer from any other registered financial provider during your relationship with BAMS, and we’ll either match or beat it.

BAMS Offers Dependable Support

How many times have you signed your name on the dotted line with a service provider only to find the implementation and ongoing support lacking to non-existent? Unfortunately, this is the risk you run post-sale with any partnership.

BAMS puts its relationships with customers above all else. This is reflected through the human connections fostered between e-commerce business owners and Merchant Account Specialists.

These individuals are with you every step of the way. They’ll provide personalized quotes, guide you through implementation, and even help your business get certified as PCI-compliant — walking you through the entire process.

Final Thoughts: Why BAMS is the Perfect Solution for Your E-commerce Business

Sifting through the variety of payment processing solutions made available to e-commerce business owners can be both frustrating and overwhelming. You want to make not only the right choice for the sake of your customers but a choice that will positively impact and grow with your business for years to come.

This is why it’s important to look at the big picture. Prioritize what matters most across your business operations and partner with a team that values your success just as much as you do.

For e-commerce businesses, BAMS’ fully-loaded payment processing platform is truly a one-stop shop. Find out what makes it the perfect solution for your business — contact our team of expert specialists to request a free quote today.

Posted on

The Best Payments Processing Service Provider For Restaurants

Restaurant Payments

Thanks to technology and the rise of digital, the restaurant industry has seen its fair share of evolution over the last decade.

From self-ordering kiosks to tabletop and handheld server tablets, restaurateurs are finding new ways to invest in customer experience. Having a point of sale (POS) and payment processing system that’s both reliable, secure, and flexible is one area, in particular, that’s of primary focus.

You need to partner with a service provider you can trust when handling the payments of your customers, especially as POS data breaches become more commonplace.

For the sake of your customer’s satisfaction and the long-term success of your restaurant business, this is why BAMS is the best payments processing service provider for restaurants:

#1: It’s Easy to Integrate with Your Existing POS

Putting BAMS to work for your restaurant business shouldn’t require a change in your existing POS technology. After all, convenience and organization are key when it comes to managing payments successfully. This is why BAMS payment processing integrates seamlessly with a wide range of popular restaurant POS systems, including Braintree, MICROS, FreedomPay, and ShopKeep.

Best of all, when it comes to support, our specialists are experienced with a variety of systems, which allows for easy setup and troubleshooting throughout.

#2: It Enables EMV POS Transactions

The shift to EMV (which stands for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) has been gradually taking place across restaurants within the last five years.

Consumer cards have become globally equipped with computer chips in an effort to protect consumers and reduce the risk of fraud. And because of this, restaurants have had to keep up with emerging POS and payment processing technology that complies with new liability rules around consumer data.

If your current POS doesn’t read EMV chip transactions, you’re putting both your business and customers at risk. Along with our processing system, BAMS’ EMV POS solutions are easy to install, set up, and integrate into your current customer experience workflow.

#3: It Centralizes Your Analytics

Storing your customer data is one thing, but making it easily accessible and actionable can change the way you do business. BAMS provides an easy-to-use analytics dashboard for restaurant businesses, providing an ongoing glimpse into business operations.

Additionally, BAMS e-commerce merchant accounts gain access to our proprietary portal — one that allows you to better streamline operations to maximize profit down the road. Storing all of this data in one CRM also helps you improve upon customer experience with easily searchable transaction history, as well as statements for simplified reconciliation.

Final Thoughts: The Best Payments Processing Service Provider for Restaurants

When it comes to the success of your restaurant business, payment processing is one piece of the puzzle where you do not want to cut corners. For the sake of customer satisfaction, security, and peace of mind as a restauranteur, partner with a payments processing service provider you can trust.

Eager to learn more about whether BAMS’ solutions are right for you? Contact our team today to request a free quote.

Posted on

Demystifying PCI Compliance – The Basics And Benefits Of Meeting The Industry Security Standard

PCI Compliance - Security

PCI compliance is one of the most important factors in establishing safe online transaction processing, but many business owners and managers know very little about it. Most either assume that it doesn’t apply to them or that they already have it – whatever it is. But e-commerce software and online payment solutions aren’t PCI compliant by default, and it’s essential that companies accepting credit card payments – both online and off – understand the basics of PCI compliance and the many benefits that it provides.

What is PCI Compliance?

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a compliance requirement designed for organizations that process credit card transactions involving the major credit companies. The program is mandated and administered by a council made up of five of the biggest players in the industry – Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and JCB.

While not mandated by federal law in the United States, the major credit brands and banks do require merchants to meet the standard in order to satisfy their terms of service. That means failure to meet even one of the many criteria could be extremely costly. As such, any company that accepts credit card payments and stores or transmits card data must fully adhere to all PCI security requirements to minimize fraud and ensure that sensitive consumer data is protected from theft.

Benefits of PCI Compliance

The benefits that organizations gain from adhering to PCI compliance really can’t be overstated. Failure to comply and the consequences that result can be disastrous. PCI compliance is something that a lot of small businesses tend to push off into the future, but there really isn’t any excuse not to get up to standard immediately considering the numerous upsides. Here are just a few of the most notable:

1) Compliance is essential to maintain customer trust

Thanks to a number of high-profile data security breaches at behemoth companies like Yahoo, AOL, and Adobe, consumers are very aware of how much of their sensitive data is stored and how vulnerable it is if not properly secured. Even consumers that don’t know what PCI compliance means may still know the term, and being able to claim full compliance is a catalyst for establishing immediate trust with customers. Conversely, a data breach caused by a lack of compliance is a surefire way to destroy that trust, and once trust has been damaged, it’s incredibly difficult to repair.

2) Compliance significantly reduces the likelihood of a costly security breach

PCI compliance is all about fighting fraud and data theft, and the standard has been expertly designed by the organizations most interested in eliminating both – the major credit card companies. By adhering fully to all 12 compliance requirements – or better yet, exceeding them – companies can ensure they’ve done everything in their power to keep customer data safe. That’s important considering the immense consequences of failing to do so. Beyond the damage a breach does to a company’s reputation, the costs of defending and settling legal actions, bank fines, and internal and external investigations are enormous.

3) Compliance is an essential part of all merchant account agreements

All reputable merchant accounts from major banks require applicants to fully comply with all of the big credit card companies’ regulations to keep their accounts in good standing. Those credit card companies all mandate PCI compliance. That means failing to be fully PCI compliant puts a company’s merchant account – and in turn their core ability to accept payments – at risk. Many small businesses think they can ignore this requirement because of the small volume of transactions that they process, but even accepting a single credit card payment, whether in-store or online, requires 100% compliance.

Achieving PCI Compliance

To become fully PCI compliant companies must first analyze the current state of their systems and their existing compliance levels. Once that’s done, filling out the PCI self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) will identify any deficiencies in the 12 individual compliance requirements. If any failure points emerge, they can then be corrected. Very few companies pass the initial compliance evaluation the first time, so fixes should be expected. Once everything is up to standard, a formal attestation of compliance can be filled out and filed with the relevant organizations. Once compliance has been certified, it must be revalidated on a quarterly or annual basis.

Taking the necessary corrective measures and getting systems up to standard can be a daunting task. The easiest way to do it, especially for companies without large tech departments, is to get help from an outside source. Customers who partner with BAMS for their payment processing have access to our experienced team of PCI experts who are there to walk our approved clients through the SAQ and the required quarterly security scans. The BAMS team makes it easier than ever for companies to ensure that they’re fully compliant and safe from the risks associated with failing to meet the standard.

Contact us today for more information on PCI compliance certification and secure payment processing with BAMS.