Take The Fear Out of Finding The Right Payment Processor

As a business owner, the number of executive decisions that need to be made on a day-to-day basis can be scary at times. Hunting for a payment processor provider for your business shouldn’t be one of those things. When digging through the thousands of solutions that are meant to help you accept payments, finding the right tools is a priority but it’s not everything.

Knowing what to look for and what to avoid can help take the fear out of finding the right payment processor, making the decision a lot easier. We want to help prevent you from making a decision that will haunt you so we’ve put together a list of options to consider when looking for the right payment processor.

Make Sure The Payment Technology Isn’t Dead and Buried

A payment processor is only as good as their customer service and their payment technology. If the terminals and tools they are offering provide more problems than solutions, it’s time to find a better processing services provider. Standard payment solutions during the days of COVID must include mobile and touch-free options.

Below are a few must-have payment processing solutions:

Contactless Terminals – A contactless terminal is a card machine that accepts various types of contactless payments by tapping, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay, and other devices that use near field communication (NFC) or radio-frequency identification (RFID).

Text2Pay Invoices – With the Text2Pay feature in the Stax Platform, you can send an invoice to your customer via SMS text, making it extremely convenient to be paid.

Digital Invoicing via the Stax Platform – With Digital Invoicing you can send an electronic invoice to your customer to be paid via email or SMS text message.

RELATED: Non-Profit Payment Processing: How Chrimata Drives Effortless Digital Donations Through Stax Connect

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Create Monster Solutions With a Unified Payment Experience

As the eCommerce market continues to expand and customers have multiple choices regarding how, where, and when to shop, providing additional payment options follow suit. Finding a simple way for your business to increasingly expand its payment offerings to support new customers is an ongoing challenge. Implementing a Unified Payments Platform is a future-proof solution that provides access to multiple payment methods through a single streamlined integration.

Stax’ integrated payment platform sets a new standard in payment technology. We offer the most streamlined payment platform experience, revolutionizing online payments to support small to medium-sized businesses all across the U.S. Our all-in-one API allows you to accept card present and card not present transactions, and you’ll have access to the best apps and tools in our app marketplace. Most importantly, because all of the payment methods run through a single platform, all of your data is accessible in a single place, making it easy to quickly understand the health of your business.

Hidden Payment Processor Fees are a Nightmare

When you’re trying to grow your business the last thing you need is an endless stream of extra payment processing fees killing your revenue generation. Don’t let hidden payment processing fees be the death of you.

One way to make sure you’re not being price gouged is by shopping around for the best rates and making sure you ask specifically about extra fees not included in the base rates. Too many processors bundle and hide fees within other charges including everything from PCI compliance to setting up your account. Average credit card processing fees range from 1.7% for swiped card payments up to 3.5% for keyed-in transactions.

Interchange Plus Pricing

A small fixed fee (between $0.10 and $0.50), plus a percentage of each purchase (between 1% and 3%) on top of the interchange fees charged by the card issuers.

Tiered

A tiered model puts credit card transactions into several categories—qualified, mid-qualified, and non-qualified. Qualified rates come from when a customer meets a processor’s criteria for the easiest, most secure transaction (swiping/inserting a card in-person). The other tiers come from having to key in the card’s details, or when a customer pays online. Tiers can also vary by card type, making this the most confusing and least transparent pricing structure.

Flat-Rate

Each card type has the same rate, typically 2.9% plus a transaction fee between 10 and 30 cents. While this seems like it may be the most straightforward at face value, it can be a very expensive pricing structure as you will pay the same rate to accept a debit card as a premium rewards credit card. The actual cost to accept a debit card is around 1%, whereas a premium rewards credit card can easily be 2.5%, but in a flat rate structure, you’ll pay the same (typically 2.9%) for both, resulting in a significant markup on many card types. So while it may be simple, it typically results in higher overall processing costs for most established businesses.

Subscription

This model uses a flat monthly membership fee, which then gets the business access to the direct wholesale cost of credit processing from Visa and Mastercard. After the monthly membership, the business only pays the wholesale cost (interchange) set by the card issuers so that the business is never overpaying for processing. This is the pricing structure that we use at Stax and established businesses that process over $7,000 per month typically see significant savings compared to the other traditional pricing structures.

Payment Processing Fees to watch out for:

Credit Card Terminal Fees
Setup Fees
Early Termination Fees
Reprogramming Fees
PCI Compliance Fees
Address Verification Fees
Chargeback and Retrieval Fees
Payment Gateway Fees
Statement Fees
Batch Fees

They Offer Security So Good It’s SCARY

There can potentially be a lot of risks involved when accepting payments today. Providing the highest level of security with complete encryption and various layers of fraud prevention tools provides an additional layer of comfort to your customers. Card information is encrypted on all of our processing devices and never stored after the transaction is completed. Stax’ state-of-the-art cloud architecture is constantly tested for vulnerabilities to ensure the safety and security of that sensitive data.

Their Customer Service is ALIVE

Talking to a physical person when you have an issue or a question is slowly dying due to the implementation of automated systems in the early 1980s. When issues arise the last thing you want is to fumble through automated options hoping to get in touch with someone who can actually help you. Time is money, especially in this case.

Stax offers in-house customer service. When you call during business hours, you will speak with someone who knows our product and is always happy to help. From training to troubleshooting, we are the company to choose if you appreciate a human touch to your customer service needs.

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How Stax Takes The Fear Out of Payment Processing

With top-rated customer support, optimized payment technology, and the highest level of PCI compliance, Stax takes the fright out of finding the right payment processing solution. We offer you subscription-based credit card processing at a direct cost. This means zero markups, zero hidden fees, and no contract.

To learn more about Stax payment processing services reach out to a payment consultant for a consultation today. We will be glad to answer any questions you may have and help you make use of our state-of-the-art integrated payment solutions right away.