We’ve come a long way since the days of placing a customer’s credit card on a manual imprinter and sending a sales draft to the bank with your daily bank deposit. Today, there are many ways to accept payments from your customers with some methods being more cost-effective than others.
Full-service Merchant Services Providers such as Aurora Payments can provide advanced processing options that are often overlooked because merchants simply don’t know about advancements in technology that could truly benefit most of our merchants. We’ll share five payment methods using our integration products that are generally less expensive than traditional chip dip transactions. While our integrated products might have a “per transaction” fee attached, the goals are to reduce your “effective rate” and increase productivity and efficiency. Your effective rate is the total amount you pay each month for all processing expenses divided into the total amount of transactions submitted.
Recurring Billing
Whether you are billing your customer the same amount each month your you want to provide four equal payments for a large transaction, our Recurring Billing integration eliminates the tedious labor of preparing and sending monthly invoices. The automated process allows your customers to set-up a convenient payment date. When the date arrives, their card is automatically charged, and the payment is automatically posted to your accounting software. This technology is far less than what you might pay an employee to perform the same functions manually.
Electronic Invoicing
Electronic Invoicing allows merchants to send an email invoice that includes a direct link for the customer to enter their payment details. Statistics show that this link causes invoice payments to be received 40% faster than traditional invoices. This is another option that most merchants think might be very expensive. Service businesses benefit the most from this. Invoices can be sent the moment the work is completed, and the customer can make the payment immediately.
Card Vaulting
PCI requirements are very strict about how sensitive credit card information is stored. A data breach can become a nightmare for a merchant if credit card data is leaked from a merchant’s servers. Target, Home Depot and Chipotle are a few big merchants who have experienced data breaches. Card vaulting keeps your customer’s credit card data safe on a third-party server that eliminates any risk for you in storing the card information. Card vaulting offers a legal way to store a customer’s credit card information for later use. This is done securely through a payment gateway vault that makes future transactions a breeze for your customers. They won’t have to enter their information for future transactions. Think about how Amazon does this. When we make household purchases from Amazon, it’s much faster with card vaulting. The vault takes away most of the risk in storing customer information. Using vault storage also allows for recurring billing through the vault.
QuickBooks Integration
QuickBooks integration is something we are asked about daily. Many merchants using QuickBooks falsely believe that they must process their credit cards through QuickBooks if they use it as their accounting platform. Many merchants have slashed the cost of credit card processing by switching their processing to us while still using QuickBooks. Transactions are posted directly to QuickBooks in real-time with our integration service. Stop paying exorbitant fees for their built-in processing services. This service is dependent on the version of QuickBooks being used. Contact us with your QuickBooks product information, and we can provide options for integration.
Point of Sale Systems
The Point-of-Sale in any business is central to conducting business. We offer affordable POS systems from popular companies such as Clover. Most modern POS systems do more than just ring up sales and process returns. POS systems can keep track of inventory, produce reports on your business’s performance and even help you launch and run loyalty and gift card programs. POS systems include payment solutions such as traditional credit cards, Apple Pay, gift certificates and more. We offer full-featured systems for retail stores, restaurants, bars, food trailers, quick-serve restaurants, hair salons and just about everything else in between. Our cloud-based, point of sale services can be integrated with custom applications and features. We even offer mobile, wireless POS systems without access to the internet or power sources. These are great for food trailers, trade shows and mobile merchants.
If we have inspired you to investigate these technological advances and improve your business’s ability to process sales, it’s worth reaching out to us for a chat. Our team is ready to place you on the right path to improvement.
