Merchant Services or Just A Service Provider?
It won’t matter if you are a start-up and just now searching for solutions for taking electronic payments or if you have been in the game running a large business with years of experience in the payment processing realm. No matter what side of the room you sit on, these are four things that you need to know.
Benefits of all-in-one merchant services
The actual benefits of choosing an all-in-one merchant services provider are revealed when you start to see all the seemingly disparate parts work together. Instead of multiple solutions struggling to work alongside one another, you’ll have a single payments ecosystem where everything works together seamlessly.
1. Smoother operations
By having everything together, you, in turn, have more control and can achieve smoother business operations. For example, you have access to real-time data from all your sales channels and customizing reports with your relevant data.
2. More efficiency
Having one payment platform means being more efficient and, more importantly, less time switching between programs, data entry, and reconciling the various accounts. Automation is key to cutting out unnecessary tasks and wasted time better focused on other business projects.
3. A single point of contact
One of society’s most despised, time-sucking experiences is being on hold with customer support. The music is terrible, the wait is long, and the frustration is high. Having a single point of contact takes all of that entirely off the table. If something goes wrong, you have your payment professional who is there to save the day. If, for whatever reason, you can’t reach your payment pro, the customer service line is 24/7/365 with typically less than one minute wait time!
That is some stellar contact support if you ask me.
4. Scalability
Having your merchant account in the start-up phase is great, but what happens when your processing volumes skyrocket and your business snowballs?
If you started with a tabletop terminal in a boutique store and then decided to add online ordering and other omnichannel options, you need someone who knows the next steps for scaling your business needs.
Our Payment Professionals are trained weekly in all forms of electronic payment. They can point you in the right direction while assisting you in making the best decisions for your payment processing.
There is a difference between a service provider (ahem, Square, PayPal, Stripe) and an actual merchant account. If you want to have the ability to take card payments via phone, mobile app, or face to face, you will need Platinum Payments, a merchant service provider.
A service provider will often provide that one primary service, an open merchant account. So what do you do if you want online payments or need a mobile solution or even a full-blown integration?
If you’re not paying attention to processes the next thing, you know you have accrued higher monthly expenses in an attempt to piece together an entire ecosystem and connect the dots. Or, instead of that, you go with a traditional merchant account and have everything in one place.
Once you have your merchant account open with an established payment gateway, the ability to add any of the following services is a reality and not just a wish from service provider land.
- Accounting integration: Accept credit card payments directly in your accounting software.
- eCommerce integration: Accept credit card payments directly in your eCommerce store.
- Virtual terminal: Accept credit card payments from your desktop computer.
- EMV terminals: Accept in-person EMV payments with terminals that sync payment data back to your accounting software and eliminate double data entry.
- Mobile app: Accept payments on the go with a mobile app.
- Email payment links: Create an invoice in your accounting software and automatically send an email payment link to customers.
- Customer payment portal: Online portal where customers can log in and manage their payments.
- Recurring billing: Create custom routine billing schedules for repeat customers.
However your business decides to take payments, there are solutions for you that can streamline and improve the process. And when they all work together, your business will begin to see the positive effects.
Accepting credit card payments isn’t rocket science; Platinum Payments strives to make it as simple, quick, and convenient as we possibly can. In addition, we love being a part of helping businesses grow and help business owners navigate the payment processing aspects as their resident specialists. The latter can provide the products and services that would benefit your business the most.