Simple Merchant Services Make Doing Business Easier
Payment processing is a complex industry with a lot of moving parts, a lot of tech, and a lot of security rules. But, for the end merchant, all that complexity represents a needless source of headaches and potential business interruptions. The best payment processors offer simple merchant services that allow businesses to focus solely on their operations without having to worry about the complexity or minutiae of how their electronic payments are handled.
Merchants shopping for a new payment processing partner should make a concerted effort to look for companies that offer simple, streamlined services in four key areas: payment processing, commerce services, support, and reporting. Prioritizing simplicity (alongside quality) in those areas will ensure merchants can offer their customers a seamless payments experience, minimize both interruptions and fees, and make payments an effectively invisible part of their operations.
Simple Payment Processing
Merchants looking for payment processing solutions have a lot of options to choose from. So many that choosing the right processing partner can be confusing. Many merchants seeking simplicity opt to go with a third-party processor like PayPal or Square because signing up and getting started is fast and easy. But third-party processors charge massive fees, and accessing simple merchant services doesn’t have to be expensive.
Payment processors like BAMS that offer interchange-plus pricing provide merchants with both the lowest cost and most transparent pricing available in the payments industry. So, while the fee tables and reports themselves may be a bit more complex than competitors like PayPal, the knowledge that they’re always paying the best possible rate on each transaction allows merchants to think less about their fees – in essence, making payments simpler and saving a significant amount of money.
Simple Commerce Systems
A merchant account enables a business to accept credit card payments online or in-store, but it isn’t enough on its own. Brick-and-mortar stores need payment terminals or point-of-sale systems to enable checkouts, and web stores need ecommerce systems like payment gateways to do the same. Many merchants are forced to get their payment processing from one company and their hardware and software from other vendors, complicating business. The best merchant services providers allow merchants to get everything they need from one place.
By getting payment terminals and online payment gateways right through their payment processors, merchants can minimize the number of vendors they need to juggle, the number of contact points for sales and service, and the number of bills they need to manage. As a result, less time is spent on logistics and more time is spent doing what merchants do best – making sales.
Simple Customer Support
When things occasionally go wrong, the ability to get fast, effective, and simple support has a direct impact on a merchant’s ability to minimize interruptions and keep doing business. It’s easy to take a payment processor’s support offerings for granted, but when an emergency strikes or assistance is needed with hardware, software, or complex issues like PCI compliance, poor support becomes a huge and costly problem.
A good merchant services partner should always include a dedicated account manager. Dedicated support enables a merchant to deal with the same payments professional as often as possible, ensuring continuity of service. It also allows the account manager to gain a real working knowledge of the merchant’s business, improving the quality of support delivered. In short, by minimizing the number of contacts a merchant has and maximizing the quality of the customer relationship, support can be simplified, ensuring solutions are always as fast and effective as possible.
Simple Reporting
The more a merchant knows about their sales, payment processing, and finances, the better they can plan, and the more informed their decision-making will be. That makes payments data an important part of every business. But the reports provided by many payment processors are dense, opaque, and confusing, and unclear reporting is often more trouble than it’s worth. Merchants selecting a payment processor should ask about how reports are delivered, and put a heavy emphasis on access to reporting that is both high quality and easy to understand.
BAMS, for instance, provides merchants with a comprehensive and highly intuitive reporting dashboard. All reports can be accessed through a single web-based system, and reports can be quickly and easily customized and configured to ensure merchants can always find the information they’re looking for without having to sift through a sea of information that isn’t relevant to the task.
A good merchant account will simplify payments, allowing a business to offer customers convenient electronic transactions while requiring little to no thought on behalf of the merchant on a day-to-day basis. To find out more about how accessing simple, yet top-quality merchant services like the ones offered by BAMS can help your business streamline operations, save money, and minimize headaches, reach out to the BAMS team or get started with your free five-point price comparison today.
