Tag: Local Merchant Service Provider

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What Tools Does BAMS Offer for Offline and Online Merchants?

Online Merchant

BAMS is the industry leader in payment processing, trusted by thousands of merchants across the globe. That success is due to our full suite of features designed to help businesses like yours accept electronic payments with less fuss, and lower fees. BAMS has been designed from the ground up to provide all of the functionality needed by both our online and offline partners, and thanks to that client-focused design, 98% of our users report lower stress when working with BAMS merchant accounts.  Here are just a few of the many features BAMS offers to our clients in both digital and brick-and-mortar sales.

 

BAMS Online Merchant Tools

Payment Gateway and eCommerce Integration

BAMS integrates seamlessly with all of the most popular payment gateways and ecommerce solutions, including Authorize.net, Magneto, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and many more. Partnering with BAMS for your merchant services means you won’t have to worry about making changes to your online store, ensuring maximum uptime and the smoothest possible experience for your customers while you get set up.

Customer Information Management

BAMS’ customer information management tokenizes and securely stores your customers’ payment information, ensuring that their sensitive data will always remain secure, boosting your PCI compliance, and enabling easy management of recurring payments. It also enables customers to store multiple payment methods so that they can easily select the most convenient options for future purchases.

 

BAMS Offline Merchant Tools

Point-of-Sale Integration

BAMS works with virtually any point-of-sale system, from fully integrated multi-terminal systems to standalone pads. That means that regardless of your existing in-store setup, partnering with BAMS will be a hassle-free process. We’ll also help you ensure that your equipment is updated to comply with EMV chip-card requirements in order to protect you from unnecessary liability exposure, and we offer a full range of EMV-compliant terminals ready to easily integrate with your in-store system.

Business Funding

One of our goals at BAMS is to help our clients get the funding they need by offering the most affordable cash advances possible. We accomplish that goal by integrating with Fundomate, the first search engine for business cash advances. BAMS partners can take advantage of our easy online application, enabling the entire process and all document submissions to be handled electronically, saving both time and paperwork. The result is that applying for cash advances through BAMS is faster and easier than ever. It’s also cheaper than ever, since we also don’t charge any of the fees associated with traditional brokers.

 

BAMS also offers a number of features and services that apply to all of our clients regardless of whether they operate online, offline, or both. That includes our powerful chargeback management tools to help minimize losses, and our industry-leading reporting and analytics suite that helps our clients make more informed business decisions. We also help all of our clients become fully PCI compliant, ensuring data security and peace of mind.

Contact us to find out more about the full suite of BAMS features and how your business can put them to work today. Our low-price guarantee and unique five-point price comparison process ensure that partnering with BAMS will not only make your payment processing easier, it’ll also help boost your company’s profitability as well.

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An Introduction To BAMS’ Popular E-Commerce Integrations

Ecommerce

We now live in a digital world, and online shopping has become king. A 2018 study by NPR found that an astounding 75% of Americans have purchased something online, and every year consumers shift more and more of their shopping to the web. As the leader in electronic payments, we at BAMS understand how important it is for our partners to have strong, stable e-commerce platforms, and as a result, we’ve designed BAMS to integrate with all of the most popular payment gateways, online checkout solutions, and fully-featured e-commerce platforms. Here are just a few of the many e-commerce integrations available through BAMS.   


Authorize.Net

Authorize.Net is the world’s largest online payment gateway, allowing merchants to accept e-commerce payments with credit cards, ACH eChecks, PayPal, ApplePay, and more. Now owned by Visa, it offers outstanding security and fraud protection and an extensive list of third-party integrations. Authotize.Net also offers streamlined single-click payment options designed to enable transactions like charity donations to be made with a minimal headache for the end-user.

Magento

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform owned by Adobe that has been used by over 250,000 online stores worldwide. Magento is one of the oldest players in e-commerce solutions, and its availability as a one-click install from a number of major hosting providers has aided its popularity. Like Authorize.Net, there is an enormous list of third-party applications that can be easily integrated with Magento stores to expand their functionality.

CyberSource

CyberSource is another e-commerce payment system owned by Visa, used by 400,000 merchants all over the world. It provides secure online checkout functionality to online stores, enabling them to accept major credit cards, as well as third-party solutions like PayPal. Its Decision Manager product is the world’s largest fraud detection system, processing and analyzing data from over 68 billion transactions annually.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a Texas-based e-commerce company offering online shopping products for websites, blogs, and social media applications like Instagram and Facebook. BigCommerce is highly scalable and offers hundreds of built-in features users can employ right out of the box without having to turn to third-party plugins. That scalability has made BigCommerce the number one eCommerce platform for businesses that bring in $1 million or more in sales each year, and it’s currently used by world-class brands like Toyota, Gibson guitars, and more.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a fully-featured e-commerce plugin specifically designed to operate with the WordPress content management system. Thanks to the widespread use of WordPress, WooCommerce has grown into one of the web’s most popular e-commerce solutions, boasting over 64,000,000 downloads. In addition to e-commerce and shopping cart functionality, WooCommerce offers a full suite of website themes, allowing users to build professional online stores using nothing but the WooCommerce platform and WordPress.

Volusion

Volusion is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that allows users to design fully-functional e-commerce websites from scratch using a suite of built-in tools and modules. It essentially acts as a content management system and e-commerce platform in one, allowing users to build out their online stores page by page, skin them with professionally designed themes, and then populate the shopping areas with all the flexibility and functionality required. In addition to its store and shopping cart features, it also includes built-in marketing tools like search engine optimization and social integration.  

 

Our long list of popular e-commerce integrations means that when you partner with us for your merchant account, you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate BAMS with your existing e-commerce solutions without having to worry about the hassle of changing your checkout process, your store setup, or your users’ experience. Contact us today to find out how BAMS can help you save money and streamline your online payment processing right away!

 

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How Your Business Can Protect Itself Against Chargebacks

Chargeback Protection

Chargebacks are an unfortunate reality of accepting credit card payments, but they aren’t something businesses have to lie down and accept without a fight. Some chargebacks are completely legitimate, like cases where a purchase was made fraudulently by a third party. But many chargebacks are fraudulent, frivolous, or abuses of the system. In those cases, there is no reason for a company to accept losing the revenue, the product, and the additional chargeback penalty, and fighting back is in order.  

 

Preventing Chargebacks

The first step in chargeback defense is to work proactively to stop them from happening in the first place. While merchants can’t prevent abusive or fraudulent chargeback requests, they can take steps to help minimize legitimate chargebacks.

Make it clear where the credit card charges are coming from:

One of the most common causes of chargeback requests is customers checking their statements and finding unfamiliar purchases. Worried about potential fraud, they then contact their card issuer and attempt to stop the payment. Sometimes this happens due to legitimate fraud, but many times it’s simply a matter of the customer not recognizing the payment descriptor – the name shown alongside the transaction amount. It’s incredibly important that merchants make themselves easy to recognize by using descriptors that match their branding rather than numbered company names or parent corporations.

Ensure customer complaints are taken care of quickly:

Of all the valid reasons major credit card companies accept chargebacks for, a number of them relate to unsatisfied customers. Unreceived orders, products that don’t match their description, defective merchandise, and misrepresented purchase terms are a few of the many reasons customers can legitimately file a chargeback. The best way to defend against consumer disputes is to take care of them with good customer service before they ever reach the chargeback stage. Addressing customer concerns quickly and professionally, and issuing refunds where appropriate, is a far better route to take than risking getting nailed with a chargeback.

 

Fighting Chargebacks

When chargebacks do come in, it’s extremely important that businesses handle them quickly and put up as strong a defense as possible to avoid the negative implication with card issuers and the hefty penalties, which can reach as high as $100 per instance. Successfully doing so comes down to understanding the system and knowing how and when to fight back.

The best response is a timely response:

A chargeback that doesn’t receive a response is a guaranteed loss, and waiting too long to respond isn’t much better. There are strict deadlines that merchants have to meet in filing their chargeback responses, and missing even one of them renders the entire process moot. Arguably the most important factor in filing a timely response is to find out about chargebacks as soon as possible. Some payment processors notify merchants of disputes by mail, which is slow and ineffective. Others, like BAMS, use SMS notifications to alert merchants as soon as a chargeback or retrieval request is filed. That speedy notification is invaluable when it comes to getting a strong defense filed in time.

Know the codes:

Each card issuer has its own set of criteria for what it considers a valid chargeback. Those reasons are managed using a set of codes, and every chargeback request will come with an associated code identifying the reason for the dispute. Understanding what those codes represent is key to filing a valid chargeback defense, so merchants absolutely need to be able to decipher them. Visa’s codes, for instance, are laid out in the Dispute Management Guidelines for Visa Merchants, and cover four major areas – fraud, authorization, processing errors, and consumer disputes.

 

One of the best ways to avoid losses from chargebacks is to partner with a payment processor that understands how serious a concern they are for businesses and offers tools to help mitigate and manage them. BAMS offers a full suite of chargeback tools, including SMS notifications, an online dispute management platform, Verifi integration, zero-liability chargeback assurances, and more.

Contact us today to find out how payment processing with BAMS can help protect your business against unnecessary losses from chargebacks.

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TurboApp – IRIS CRM’s Merchant-Boarding Secret Weapon

Merchant

All BAMS customers receive full access to IRIS CRM, one of the most powerful customer resource management platforms currently available on the market. IRIS CRM provides a full suite of tools that enable companies to manage all aspects of their operations, from communications to leads and prospecting, to sales, to payments, and beyond.

One of IRIS CRM’s most important features is TurboApp, a built-in application designed specifically for independent sales organizations looking to streamline their merchant boarding. With TurboApp, what was once an involved process requiring large amounts of manual entry can now be almost completely automated, allowing users to board new merchants far more efficiently than ever before.


How Does TurboApp Work?

TurboApp integrates directly with the major front-end providers so that the data from merchant applications entered into the IRIS CRM system can be passed right through, all from within the CRM. That’s a revolutionary advancement because it removes the time-consuming step of having to manually process a merchant’s application and then manually transfer all of the relevant information over into an application portal.

Thanks to IRIS CRM’s built-in eSignature functionality, applications are ready to go once they’re passed through to TurboApp, and all an agent has to do is upload the relevant attachments and check over the data to ensure there aren’t any errors.

TurboApp also allows boarding of multi-location merchants from within a single application.  Each location generates its own tab within the overall merchant application, allowing agents to follow the same simple steps as they would for a single-location application and eliminating the time-consuming process of handling data individually for each separate place.

TurboApp integrates with all of the leading front-end solution providers, including First Data Omaha, First Data North, Vantiv, Priority, Pivotal, iPayment, and a number of others. No matter which processor an application is being boarded to, TurboApp allows it all to be done in a matter of a few clicks.

 

The Many Benefits of Using TurboApp for Merchant Loading

The most obvious benefit to TurboApp is the speed with which it allows agents to board new merchants. By eliminating most of the manual work traditionally involved in merchant boarding, TurboApp allows the process to be completed four to seven times faster. That means agents waste less of their time each day on busy work, and can spend more focusing on signing up new accounts and bringing in revenues.

The other major benefit of TurboApp is the promotion of accuracy – an important factor whenever data handling is involved. The traditional boarding process is rife with opportunities for problems. Every time a piece of data is moved manually from one source to another, the possibility for data entry errors exists. Data entry errors can be the difference between an application getting approved or rejected, and as a result, they can be extremely costly. By removing as much manual data handling from the process as possible, TurboApp helps ensure that data quality is never compromised, resulting in more approvals and a fatter bottom line.

 

TurbpApp is a game-changing productivity tool, and it’s only one of the many powerful features include in IRIS CRM. All BAMS merchant services partners get full access to the full IRIS CRM suite, so get in touch with us to find out how you can put this incredible customer resource management tool to work for your company today.

 

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What BAMS Can Do For Your Supermarket?

Supermarket

Your supermarket depends on the people that live in your local community, and just as importantly, they depend on you. Your success and growth come down to the quality of service you provide and the value your customers get for their hard-earned dollars, and both of those factors are impacted by payment processing.

BAMS is the ultimate payment processing partner for small businesses like yours because we enable you to give your customers the payment options they want, help you streamline their payment experience, and help you pad your bottom line in the process. Here are just a few of the benefits partnering with BAMS can provide to your supermarket.

 

BAMS Can Help Increase Your Sales

Studies have shown that people paying with credit cards are willing to spend more money than when paying with cash. The reason is that a tap or swipe of the credit card is perceived as far less painful than handing over cold, hard cash. That means people paying with cards are both more likely to spend more money as a whole, and are also more likely to indulge in near-the-checkout impulse purchases.

That has huge implications for your supermarket, the most obvious being that if you aren’t already accepting credit cards, you’re leaving money on the table. Aside from this well-researched consumer behavior, accepting credit cards just makes sense, since fewer and fewer people are carrying cash at all as consumer payment habits move further towards plastic with each passing year.

 

BAMS Can Help Reduce Your Fees

If you are currently accepting credit card payments, there’s a good chance you’re either using a third-party provider like Square, or that you just signed on with your bank because you thought they’d be the best rate available. In both of those cases, the odds are that the fees you’re paying on each transaction are higher than they need to be.

At BAMS, we’ve developed an industry leading five-step price comparison designed specifically to determine how and where we can save you money before providing you with a detailed quote. That way, you can be absolutely certain that partnering with BAMS is the right move not only for your peace of mind but for your wallet as well.

 

BAMS Can Help Streamline Your Tracking and Reporting

BAMS does more than just process payments; it also provides a full suite of tools to help you better manage your business, including detailed tracking and reporting on all of your transaction handling. BAMS also comes with access to IRIS CRM, a leading customer resource management tool that can help you streamline almost all aspects of your business.

These tools allow you to minimize monotonous and time-consuming housekeeping tasks so that you can focus more on growing your business and serving the customers and community that depend on your grocery store and drive your sales.

 

At BAMS, our goal is to enable you to offer your customers the credit card and debit payment options they expect while cutting your costs and making card payments more profitable for you. We’d love the opportunity to show you how BAMS can benefit your supermarket the same way it’s benefited thousands of businesses all over the world, so give us a call today to find out more.

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3 Ways the Right Merchant Services Help You Keep a Positive Cash Flow

NY Merchant Services concept. Young startup entrepreneur small business owner working at home, packaging and delivery situation.

Merchant services play a large role in your business. They help you collect revenue, but they also impact your expenses. Find the right company that doesn’t disrupt your cash flow.

1. Reliable services let you know future merchant service rates.

Every business needs a forecasted budget. A great deal of effort in the business world is focused on how to record and predict revenue. But expenses are just as important. Fixed expenses are the best type of expenses for a business, but merchant services don’t fall under that category. The total grows along with your revenue, and additional fees can add up.

So make sure you merchant services provider is as transparent as possible. You need to know the rates down to the last decimal point, and they need to be numbers you can rely on without having to anticipate surprise rate changes.

2. You get the money in your account faster.

Different merchant services have different processes. Some companies send you back the funds after a few days, and it can take even longer for purchases that were processed after their office hours. Look for a merchant service that offers tight turnaround for purchases during work hours, late at night, and on the weekends. If your company has bills you need to pay, you need to have the cash on hand to do it.

3. You don’t receive unexpected chargebacks.

Credit card companies protect their customers, not merchants and stores. That means customers have an increasing number of ways to get their money back after a credit card purchase. Sometimes it’s a legitimate return, and other times it’s a sincere complaint about an unwanted charge. But sometimes it’s less than honest. No matter what the motivation behind the chargeback, you need to know about it so you can respond quickly. Chargebacks are becoming more frequent, and they can quickly eat into your cash flow.

Go to BAMS to find merchant services that are predictable, process funds quickly, and keep you updated.

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Don’t Have Dangerous Gaps in PCI Compliance

Stack of multicolored credit cards close-up view with selective focus.

When you’re looking for a payment processing site so you can make personal online transactions, you might just use the first thing you come across. But when it comes to your business, you want to back up your choice with some research. Different payment processing tools, like PayPal, Stripe, and BAMS, offer a wide array of benefits and supplemental features. The most important thing for your business, however, is PCI compliance.

How does PCI compliance apply to your business?

PCI DSS, or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a list of standards for securing payment processing details. If your company even touches payment information, whether you’re storing the information or just accepting, processing, or transmitting it, then you’re responsible for maintaining a secure environment for that data. That’s why more and more companies are using third-party providers to handle payment processing. If payments are routed through another site entirely, your liabilities are limited.

How do you know which processing service provides the best PCI compliance?

The best way to know which service is for you is to start studying your own business. How do you usually get paid? Online stores will have a lot of individual transactions. Subscription service providers, whether they provide online services or something physical like landscaping, may have automatic payments. If your company provides freelance services, you may need to invoice clients for monthly services or varying amounts.

Once you know how your company sends requests for payment and receives payment, start looking for exceptions. Stripe, for example, doesn’t have an inbuilt invoicing tool so you will need to check your additional third-party services for PCI compliance. PayPal does offer more PCI compliance, but only at certain levels of subscription.

Most e-commerce payment processing platforms are all but required to have PCI compliance, but your company may be liable for any gaps. So look for those gaps before finalizing your choice. Browse our blog for more ways to choose the best platform for your business.