What You Need to Know About Payment Processing for Your Business

As a small to medium sized business owner, there are a myriad of problems at the micro level that are constantly grasping for your attention. Depending on your background and experience, the odds you are well versed in every facet of what your business requires to thrive probably isn’t great – and that’s okay.

Here is a brief guide to get you started when it comes to optimizing payment processing for your business.Here’s a hint: your payment processor can quite literally make or break your business.

Carefully Select a Payment Processor

Not all payment processors are created equal. Each has unique strengths, weaknesses, and specializations within their feature set that may or may not suit your business. You will need to shop around before finding the best fit for you, but the main thing to consider along the way is how well their features meet your current and future business needs. For instance, if your sales are exclusively generated online, your payment processor should have an expertise in e-commerce solutions such as cart integration, gateways, and hosted payment forms, while brick-and-mortar solutions won’t matter as much. In addition to specialization, your payment processor must incorporate features in each of the areas touched on below. Although there exist effective measures outside of your processor, as you will soon read, your selection will heavily aid or impair your ability to save money and scale your business.

Understand and Reduce Fraud

If your business accepts debit or credit cards, fraud is one of, if not the biggest, source of financial loss. Frequently this manifests itself in the form of chargebacks in which not only the transaction amount is lost, but also any and all labor, shipping, and processing fees that went into the fulfillment of the sale. To reduce the amount of money lost to fraudulent transactions, your first step must be to thoroughly verify your customers. Between your payment processor and online security measures, you must at minimum incorporate multi-factor authentication, CVV code requirements, IP address verification, and suspicious transaction flagging into your checkout process before any money changes hands.

Use an Integrated Payment Processing Solution

Integrated payment processing describes the smooth and extremely time-convenient combination of your accounting and payment processes under a single provider. Among the many advantages this provides you with, data security and reduction in accounting errors present themselves at the top of the list. Instead of operating distinct POS and accounting systems that require data to be sent back and forth, integrated payment unifies the two eliminating the possibility that data may be incorrectly or unsafely transferred. In addition to these benefits this type of integration will undoubtedly smoothen out a litany of other tasks such as invoice creation, tax preparation, and allows for easy cost analysis that has the potential to save your business a lot of cash.

Leverage Customer Data

Many of the payment processors used today, especially integrated ones, will include features that allow you to segment and study your customers based on demographic and purchasing history. In many ways this can be wielded as a marketing superpower for your business allowing you to more effectively target advertisements and make changes to the way your business interacts with its customers based upon their preferences and habits.All in all, what you need to know about payment processing is that your payment processing provider has an incredibly large impact on the day-to-day operations of your business and can frankly dictate its trajectory in the right circumstance.

If you are searching for the right fit or are unhappy with your current provider, it is imperative that you take these factors and others into consideration to find the provider that best meets your needs.

Feeling like you have a lot to learn?

Kubera is here to help! Instead of spending precious personal time scouring the internet for payment strategies, pricing, and potential providers, let our team of experts do the work for you. Each of our clients is unique and therefore deserves a unique approach –  all you need to do is schedule a one-hour consultation and wait for us to get back to you with a solution specially tailored to your business needs.