21 Things Your Payment Provider Should Be Doing

1. Assisting with chargebacks

Chargebacks happen when a customer disputes a charge with their credit card company or bank. A cardholder has 60 days from the date of the transaction to dispute it, so early warning from the payment processor and prompt response times from the business that accepted the transaction is vital. Helping your businesses understand how to reduce chargebacks, notifying you when they happen, and working with you to collect the necessary information required to overturn a dispute should be a common practice for all credit card processing entities.

2. Optimizing your account

There are many qualification levels for rates and fees when accepting a credit card. They are based on SIC code, transaction size, risk parameters, and specific data that should be passed along with different types of transactions (swipe, EMV/Chip, manually keyed, eCommerce, business cards, international). For example, when a credit card is manually keyed in from a phone order or online, lower fees are charged for passing along a matching cardholder zip code with the transaction. Experienced payments professionals get it right the first time to help businesses make the most money from each sale with the least amount of risk. 

3. Keeping Your Technology Up to Date

In the early days of credit cards, most businesses used the same type of hardware and software to accept credit cards (and checks for the old school organizations). Now, POS systems can be purpose-built for the exact way you run your business and the industry you are in. If you can dream it, point-of-sale technology can do it. Payments providers should now be modern-day POS specialists as the two have fully merged. This is a good thing, as your support is simplified and services are streamlined. 

4. Providing World-Class Support
With technology comes more moving parts. The more parts, the more things that can and will go wrong. A company that is easy to reach and knowledgeable about the inner workings of your business and its specific point-of-sale hardware and software is a must. Choose a vendor with feet on the street where each of your locations resides in the event of a system malfunction, on-site training needs, troubleshooting, and hands-on support. 

5. Simplifying PCI Compliance Requirements
Every business that takes credit cards needs to be PCI (payment card industry) compliant which ensures their internal and external environment is free from potential breaches by following 12 high-level guidelines. For example, did you know you can’t write down a full credit card number on a piece of paper or on a computer document, and if your telephone system records calls you can’t take cards over the phone?

In addition, each business, based on the type and systems, is required to complete a specific self-assessment questionnaire annually and some are required to do quarterly network scans. Bonus points if your payments providers also offer breach insurance with their PCI Compliance program to cover fees or fines in the event of a security breach. 

6. Encrypting Data with a Point to Point Solution

Point-to-point encryption (P2PE) is an advanced security tool that helps protect the sensitive information contained within a credit card. When a business uses P2PE, credit card data is encrypted from the moment the card is swiped or dipped, while the payment data is in transit and all the way from authorization and approval. A P2PE solution can help minimize your PCI scope by helping you comply with the latest security standards – reducing the risk of fraud and keeping your business safe. You and your customers can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your payment environment is secure.

7. Tokenizing Transactions

Simply put — tokenization is a fraud-prevention measure designed to protect sensitive payment credentials. Tokenization accomplishes this by substituting all of a user’s payment details with non-specific IDs known as “tokens.” For example, a credit card number like 4331-1244-5658-8762 might be converted into a much shorter tokenized value like B7f6%3fhTu. Only the business’s payment processor can match this token against the customer’s original credit card number. It is unreadable by anyone else (including the business). Even if a token is intercepted mid-transit across an unsecured network, criminals cannot reverse-engineer the customer’s payment information. The token is useless to them and cannot be used to make purchases.

8. Keeping you in the loop with industry changes

The payments industry moves at the speed of light; compliance and card acceptance rules change annually, certain terminals, pin-pads, and payment gateways are rendered obsolete or PCI non-compliant often, PCI Compliance standards, themselves, change which affects the annual certification process, and the list goes on. Choose a payments partner that has your back, and stays on top of the most relevant information on your behalf. 

9. Setting up the best fee structure for your business (and not changing it)

Bundled, tiered, interchange-plus; they all have their place. But, your processor should know what’s best for your business type and why. In addition, those costs shouldn’t increase year over year and should stay locked in for the life of the business. Furthermore, a “price-match-guarantee” is an ideal agreement to sign ensuring your provider is putting their best foot forward at all times by agreeing to match competitive offers. 

10. Eliminating Contractual Obligations

Your payments provider should prove their worth every day and their clients should stay on board because they love the service. If they don’t they should be free to walk away penalty-free and not feel obligated to stay because of the financial punishment to do so. 

11. Letting you know when you aren’t a good fit

With so many specialized systems, it’s nearly impossible for merchant services organizations to have a “one-size fits all” approach. So if your size doesn’t fit them, they should walk away and point you in the right direction to avoid making you their test client. 

12. Connecting the software puzzle pieces

A point-of-sale system can and should act like the central nervous system for a small business as modern technology allows it to connect every moving part of an operation. From employee scheduling to payroll integration and online ordering integration to digital gift cards, the right applications can and should all talk to one another directly from your POS system.

13. Reviewing with you annually

Things change; technology, concepts, future goals. Your payments provider is responsible for making sure the bulk of your income is managed properly (The majority of businesses today report more than 90% of all revenue comes from credit card sales), so they should be the first ones to make sure everyone’s goals align properly. 

14. Providing funding options for growth

Your merchant services provider is essentially a bank for your payment processing. As a bank, make sure to choose a provider that can leverage your future receivables as a loan that can be paid back through your future credit card transactions. 

15. Ensuring consistent FEIN & Legal business name match
Each year, credit card processors are required to report annual processing revenues to the IRS by law. These figures are reported using your business's legal name and federal tax ID. If either of them is incorrect or does not match with the other, the IRS can place a 28% hold on your future revenue until the error is corrected. Once corrected, the funds don’t come back until the following year's tax filing. Your merchant services provider should be confirming this information matches within 10 business days of your initial setup to avoid problems down the road.

16. Sending out accurate 1099 reports annually 

The annual 1099 reports should be sent in January every year by your payments provider and should only include credit card transactions and not cash. These figures should match, to the penny, what your business processed in the prior year as that is what your merchant service company has reported to the IRS for tax purposes. In the event of inaccurate information, you are likely to have a tax liability on your hands. 

17. Providing detailed reporting tools

What’s selling, what’s not, what items have the highest and lowest profit margins, what is the current outstanding gift card balance from all customers, which servers have the highest avg check or lowest turn time, and many other questions can be answered instantly when your POS and payments processor merges data properly. With this information at your fingertips in a real-time dashboard, you can make more informed decisions to help your business grow. Software setup, training, and ongoing support for these features should come standard.

18. Allowing payments in every way

Retail & restaurant, in-person and online, one-time sales or stored transactions, electronic invoices, our recurring sales, your payments provider should be equipped for everything you can throw at them. And as a small business, you need every advantage you can get.

19. Uploading menus and inventory 

For a seamless business launch or transition from another provider, spending days uploading your products correctly into new software you barely know makes little sense. Your new provider should have a process to export, import, and allow you to focus on learning how to properly collect money from customers on your new POS system. 

20. Providing Go-live assistance 

When your business opens and customers start coming in, the last thing on your mind is remembering how to split a guest check 6 ways or how to charge a customer who has an item that the barcode won’t scan on. Professional on-site support can help teach, train, and solve these issues on the fly, helping your first day be a little less rocky and guiding you towards how to solve these issues when they come up in the future.

21. Set up contactless everything 

Scan to pay QR codes, mobile table-side ordering, online curbside pickup alerts, paperless receipts, digital QR codes; customers’ payment preferences have grown by leaps and bounds and the future is here. Make sure your business comes along for the ride by partnering with a provider who has all the bells and whistles.