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Should I Work with A Third-Party Processor?

Payment Processing

Third-party processors, like PayPal, Square, and Stripe, are companies that provide payment processing to clients by pooling all client payments through their own master merchant accounts. For example, if you sign up with PayPal, you do not get your own merchant account. Instead, whenever you accept a credit card payment, that payment is processed through PayPal’s merchant account (along with every other transaction from every one of their members), and you are then paid out, in turn, by PayPal. 

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Is Toast POS Leaving Merchants Burnt? A Quick Look at Toast POS Part One of Two

Toast POS

Toast POS is a cloud-based restaurant POS provider and payment processor that offers restaurants a variety of POS options built on an Android framework. Toast has been growing rapidly since it launched its POS platform in 2013, and many restauranteurs are drawn to Toast both for its simplicity and the attractive pricing offers the company makes to new clients. But, despite its success, Toast POS has some notable drawbacks that make it a good choice for some restaurateurs, but a terrible choice for others. In this two-part article, we’ll examine some of the pros and cons of Toast and how it stacks up against some of the other competition. 

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Is Interchange Plus the Best Pricing Plan? How the Most Transparent Pricing Model on the Market Provides Huge Savings on Merchant Fees

Interchange Plus the Best Pricing Plan

One of the most important questions any business should ask themselves when looking for a new merchant account or merchant services provider is “how will this service impact my profitability.” It can be easy to simply write off merchant fees as a cost of doing business – and certainly, they are – but small differences in those fees can have big impacts on a merchant’s bottom line. A difference of a fraction of a percentage point or a few dimes in fees, when applied over every single transaction a business does, can easily be the difference between profit and loss – success and failure. So, it’s incredibly important for merchants to realize that not all pricing plans are created equal, and to understand the options they have available to them. One pricing plan that merchants looking for a new payment processor should keep an eye out for is interchange-plus pricing – a less common, but highly beneficial pricing model that helps to eliminate overcharging by keeping fees grounded and transparent. 

 

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Part Two: Is an Ounce of Chargeback Prevention Worth A Pound of Cure?

Chargeback Prevention

In part one of this two-part series, we looked at some of the technology-based solutions merchants have available to them to catch fraud early on and stop it before it can result in chargebacks and lost revenues. In part two, we’ll look at the other side of the coin – legitimate chargebacks filed by customers who feel like they’ve been wronged. These chargebacks can’t always be avoided, and sometimes all a merchant can hope for is a fast and easy resolution. But there are steps that merchants can take to minimize the number of legitimate chargeback requests they face, and they all revolve around understanding the customer-side of the equation and elevating the quality of service provided. 

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Part One: Is an Ounce of Chargeback Prevention Worth A Pound of Cure?

Chargeback Prevention

A seller receives an order and delivers on their end of the bargain flawlessly, only to later find that the money they earned has been clawed back due to a chargeback. This is an all too common scenario, especially in commerce online where purchases are made without any physical, real-world interaction between customer and merchant. It’s also a scenario that can be incredibly costly for merchants in more ways than just lost revenues. Large retailers can afford to dedicate staff to dispute resolutions, but for smaller merchants, chargebacks are often poorly understood, let alone effectively handled. But, with a little bit of knowledge and some careful planning, merchants both large and small can significantly reduce their need to handle them at all by taking the necessary steps to ensure they don’t happen in the first place. In this two-part series, we’ll examine the most effective ways merchants can do just that, using both the fraud prevention tools available to them and some customer service best practices. 

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Why Do So Many Businesses Prefer WooCommerce over Shopify?

WooCommerce over Shopify

WooCommerce and Shopify are two of the leading e-commerce platforms in the world. Each is full-featured and designed specifically to aide online sales, but there are as many differences (if not more) than there are similarities between the two platforms. Below we’ll analyze four of the primary areas of comparison between the two platforms, and why, while Shopify has become a giant in the space, WooCommerce is the preferred choice of so many businesses around the globe. 

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What Is Risk Scoring and How Can It Help You?

Risk Scoring

Minimizing risk is a task of great importance to everyone involved in online commerce and electronic payments, from the merchants right through to the credit card issuers. High fraud rates and chargeback rates can have a significant impact on merchants, even resulting in enrollment in chargeback and fraud monitoring programs that can carry hefty fees. Risk scoring is a tool to help merchants avoid those negative consequences by catching and stopping fraud as it happens, and more and more merchants are enlisting them in the never-ending fight against credit card fraud. 

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What is Cyber Monday and What Can It Mean for Merchants?

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is the online sale event of the year. Since 2005, it has occurred every year on the Monday after Thanksgiving and is the opposite bookend to the more longstanding Black Friday sale. And while Black Friday might be the most important shopping day of the year when it comes to in-store brick and mortar sales, overall, Cyber Monday is now king, with almost eight billion dollars spent on Cyber Monday 2018. That shift means a couple of things: first, that Cyber Monday represents a huge opportunity for merchants to supercharge their holiday sales, and second, that competition for online shoppers’ attention is at a yearly high on that day. 

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