5 Things to Consider When You’re Choosing Your Payment Processor

You’re a small business owner. You want to launch an online store. This is the story for thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people today. Or, maybe you’re already running at full speed but you’re wondering if there’s a better option when it comes to your payment processor.

Ecommerce was already booming, and the COVID19 crisis, with all of the social distancing requirements it implicates, is making the numbers skyrocket. Ecommerce has become not just a boom, but a veritable lifeline for businesses. And, of course, one of the decisions one must make when going online, is how to process payments.

Here’s five things to consider when making that decision:

Diversity pays

You probably know you want to accept credit cards. But which ones? Visa and MasterCard are pretty standard, but can your processor handle AmericanExpress? And will it charge you more? Are you going to accept debit cards? PayPal? What about digital wallets or bank transfers?

It’s very important to understand who your target customers are and how they pay. Then you can start to plan on what options you need to make available. When in doubt, a wide net is probably preferable. Two things we know for sure:

• Customers will disappear if their preferred payment options are not available;
• Digital currencies are the fastest growing payment option by a longshot.

Costs vary wildly

Payment processors don’t all cost the same. Not by a longshot. When you’re making these decisions, and selecting which payment options you’re going to propose to your customers, you need to understand what they’ll do to your own margins.

It’s entirely different to pay 1% processing fees and to pay up to 9%, and that’s a realistic value that you can expect from some processors if you’re shipping across borders and across currencies. Make sure you understand whether you’re getting:

• Tiered pricing: in which the processor will charge you according to the volume of every specific sale. Usually, this will mean three different tiers, that range from cheapest to most expensive. This makes things easier to understand because of the 300 interchange rates out there, you only need to worry about these broader “buckets”. You need to be careful to understand where your price-ranges fall on every company’s structure, however, because they will all be different.
• Interchange plus pricing: This will mean you pay a percentage (say 2%) of your revenue for each transfer, plus a fixed price (say $0.10) on top of the interchange rate. Mind, there are over 300 interchange rates, so it can be daunting to know exactly how much you’re paying.
• Flat-rate: It does what it says on the box. You pay a fixed percentage of your income (say 2.9%), sometimes with an extra (say $0.30 per transaction).

Regardless of what option you’re presented with, be sure to look for hidden fees. Sometimes flat-rates aren’t that flat, and if you ship abroad, or get paid in a different currency, you’ll be stuck with border rates, or exchange commissions. If you accept wire-transfers, banks often won’t even discriminate what they’re charging you extra for, and just add “other charges” to your statement.

Fraud and chargeback protections can be game changers

When accepting payment via traditional means, say credit card for instance, there is a level of exposure to risk that must be accepted, both for customers and merchants. A system that requires you to share your personal information (such as card numbers) on the Internet will always be fertile grounds for fraud. In fact, losses due to fraud are expected to reach the staggering amount of $25 BILLION by 2024.

It’s extremely important to ensure that the payment provider you select has fool proof fraud protection.

And chargebacks are a serious matter as well. They can cost merchants about the same amount per annum: $25 billion just off of friendly fraud alone.

Bottomline is simple: For every dollar in fraud, retails incur $3.13 in costs.

When will you get paid?

Not all payment processors take the same time to get the job done. Wire transfers can take up to five days to cross borders, for instance. You’d think credit cards would work much faster, but the reality is that from the moment the customer clicks “pay” on your website to the moment the money enters your bank account, three days can elapse.

Whatever your choices end up being, it is essential that your accounting takes into consideration the timings of these payments.

Integration needs to suit your needs

You have your own site, and you like it. You’re probably not interested in making overarching changes, or integrating a dozen plugins that are sometimes buggy and problematic. Not all payment processors are integrated into all payment platforms. You need to understand whether integration of the service is easy, or even if it’s feasible at all. These kinds of technical details can be quite expensive to fix if they’re not done right.

What’s next?

So now that you have the data and the details, here’s what we can do for your business:

Utrust was built for the digital age. We are digital natives. This is why market leaders like S.L. Benfica, Luís Onofre and Alternative Airlines are already reaping the benefits of using our services to accept digital currencies.

We will cut up to 80% off your transaction fees.That is not a typo. But how about international fees, and borders, and conversion rates, and chargebacks, and all the other hidden fees that everyone else is charging you?

They are gone.

Period.

• With Utrust, your transaction fees drop by 80%, due to digital currencies being decentralized and cutting out the middleman. 1% fee. Flat.
• We are borderless. You can accept payments from anywhere in the world and get paid in your usual currency extremely fast. That means within minutes.
• We have eliminated chargebacks. All sales are final and recorded on an immutable ledger.
• There are no conversion fees. You get paid in fiat, in your bank account. No need for digital currencies accounting.

But that’s not all Utrust offers.

• Protection against fraud is absolute. We haven’t adapted to the Internet. We have always been here. Your customers will never have to share their private information online.
• A whole new market. There are over 45 million digital currencies users out there, and that market won’t remain untapped for long.
• Utrust is easy as it should. With Utrust, integration is just one step away. We provide a custom API that we can tailor to your needs and plugins for major payment platforms like Magento, Woocommerce or Payrexx.

Now is the time to expand your horizons and start accepting digital currencies. With ecommerce expanding so abruptly, digital currency adoption will be accelerated. This is becoming increasingly obvious both in Europe and the US.

And we are part of making it happen. We understand that our role is to facilitate payments, and this is why we are waiving our fees for new businesses who start accepting digital currencies. For three months, you pay 0%.

The money of the future waits for no one. Head here, join us now, and make sure you don’t miss this opportunity.