Cash payments continue to make way for contactless payments be it via credit/debit cards or completely digital payments like NFC or digital wallets. As a small business owner therefore, it is imperative to choose the right payment processing partner to ensure you have the right tools to accept all kinds of payments and keep your customers happy while at the same time not paying too much in fees.
There are a plethora of payment processing partners to choose from with everyone offering great benefits and features. What are the key criterion that need to evaluated as it pertains to choosing the best of them all.
Key Things To Consider Before Choosing The Right Payment Processing Services Partner
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Acceptance of all kinds of payments
Since customers now have a lot of ways to pay for their purchases, you need to ensure that your payment processing partner offers a variety of ways to accept payments. It is also imperative that you take a long term view with this evaluation criteria to ensure that you are setup for success. This means that not only should the right payment processing partner should provide acceptance of all kinds of credit/debit cards (chip & magnetic strips) but also NFC based payments (Apple, Samsung) .
Not only that you should also try and understand your payment processing partner’s technology roadmap as it pertains to newer digital currencies like Cryptocurrency. Digital currencies may not be as mainstream right now but the cost of switching a payment processing partner can be very high so you want to ensure their product roadmap is innovative
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Omni-Channel Integration
It is equally important that your payment processing services partner offers seamless features to accept payment in any environment it in your physical store, online and mobile. If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught, is that for small businesses it is critical to be flexible and going online is a no-brainer. So, not factoring your payment processing partner’s ability to offer multi-channel solutions could be a deal breaker. Managing multiple payment processing partners for different channels not only comes with a lot of management overhead but could also impact your ability to re-concile and manage cash flows
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Payment Processing Fees
This is a no-brainer. While having a payment processing partner can definitely boost your small business’s topline growth, you also have to ensure that your bottom line is not impacted.
To that effect, take the time to understand and negotiate on the fees. Take a stock of your specific use case and understand what fees tiers apply best to your business. So while the one-time hardware costs may not leave too much room to negotiate on, figure out any qouta (# transaction) based fee tiers that may or may not make sense for you. See if there are pay-as-you-go tiers that you can opt early on and scale as your transaction volume grows
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Payment Security & Data Compliance
The most basic but one of the most important of them all is your payment processing partner’s sophistication around offering the highest levels of security and compliance. This means that your payment processing partner at the very least should be PCI compliant but go a step further and offer robust fraud detection & data encryption features
There you go! Some key parameters that will help you choose the right payment processing partner for your small business success. So whether you are a small business selling groceries or loungewear apparel, take the time to choose the right payment processing partner
