How to Reduce Your Credit Card Processing Costs!
Did you know that a payment gateway is one of the best ways to reduce your credit card processing costs? The gateway will not only offer you many alternatives that you can use to receive payments from your clients in many different ways. But it will also help you reduce your costs by decreasing the number of fees that you will need to pay. There are two main methods through which this type of software can help you.
• Level 3 processing. If most of your transactions are made towards other businesses, government agencies, or associations, then your transactions are eligible for level 3 processing. This method will reduce the interchange fee to almost half its normal costs. The standard fee is 2.95% per transaction. While using specialized software can reduce it to 1.9%. In the short term, this amount may seem insignificant. But a reduction of 1% will mean a lot of money in the long term.
• Recurring billing. The second method through which you can reduce your costs is through recurring billing. This will automate a part of the payment process, and it will eliminate many of the fees that you would need to pay per transaction. The only fees that will remain are the ones from the moment when the subscription is made. The automated payments made through these subscriptions will not be charged by the fees.
Depending on the level of your business, it may be the best method that you can use to reduce the costs of your business. Although you will have to pay for the software, with enough transactions, the costs will be covered, and you may even be able to make more profits. Moreover, the software will provide many more advantages that will help you grow your business easier and much faster than you could do without it. For example, recurring billing will also provide two other benefits.
The Efficiency of Your Credit Card Processing Will Increase!
If you can switch your sales model towards recurring billing, then you can increase the efficiency of your credit card processing massively. How so? Well, through recurring billing, most of the payment processing will be made automatedly. And the efficiency of a program is much higher than the efficiency of a human. With this method, you can also get three essential benefits.
• Save time. Imagine the difference made between making each transaction manually and letting a software to take care of it for you. How much time will you be able to save? The more clients your business has, the more transactions need to be made. This also means that the time lost on processing these transactions manually is a lot. But if you are going to use the software, then the time can be saved and used for other purposes.
• Save effort. The effort used for these menial tasks will also disappear. And it can also be used for other tasks. This does not mean that your employees will not have anything to do. You can always find something new for them to take care of. By doing this, you will be able to increase the efficiency of your business. And the benefits of doing that are immeasurable.
• Grow faster. Automation is the key to success. The more process of your business is automated, the easier it will be to manage, and more time and effort can be used to grow it. Instead of wasting time and effort on menial tasks such as payment processing. It is better to use a gateway and transfer your resources towards places that will increase the growth of your company.
A Payment Gateway will Increase the Security of the Payments Made by Your Clients!
Another advantage offered by a payment gateway is an increase in security. Most payment processing companies will require you to be PCI compliant. If you are not, then they will help you through the process. This is an enormous benefit that not only will make your business safer to work with, but you can use this as a marketing method to attract new clients. But firstly, what means to be PCI compliant?
PCI DSS is one of the biggest standards that was created for the card payment processing industry. Basically, every company that accepts payments from their customers through a bank card needs to be compliant with this standard. It is a highly recognized standard because it was created by a collaboration between the biggest card payment brands such as American Express, Visa, And MasterCard. For this reason, most payment processing companies will require and even help you become compliant with this standard.
There are basically two requirements that you need to regularly meet to remain compliant with the standard. The first one is to ensure that you have the required knowledge about your system security. It is an annual self-assessment questionnaire. So, every year you will need to complete and pass this test. The second requirement is to pass a quarterly scan of your systems that use the internet. A PCI certified company needs to make these scans to ensure that your systems have a high enough security to not be hacked.
Being compliant with this standard will require your systems to have a high-level of security. This also means that your business’s information and money are safer. You will not have any reason to fear that a hacker may steal from you. But you still need to be careful, because your data can be stolen through direct access to your systems.
But the biggest advantage is the fact that the information of your clients is also very safe. This means that you can market yourself as a very secure company by making use of the name of this standard. By doing this, the number of your clients will grow. On the other hand, without enough security, the information of your clients may be lost, and you may have to suffer some consequences as well.