Payment transaction fees can account for a large portion of your overhead if you have to process many of them or if you routinely have to process big ones. Some business owners do a great job at monitoring their costs and finding ways to reduce them, while other people see transaction costs as an afterthought. If you’re one of these people, we’d like to say that you’re making a big mistake and that there’s no reason for you to overspend on something you could save on so easily. Let’s take a look at a few ways that you could reduce your payment transaction costs.
Accept ACH Payments
One of the easiest and fastest ways to reduce your overall monthly transaction costs would be to move to an ACH payment solution. ACH payments are not transacted over the SWIFT network and take a fraction of the time to get processed. They’re also extremely safe and allow you to verify a buyer’s account before the payment is processed; largely eliminating bounced payments or fraud.
ACH payments work principally for people in businesses that accept checks and those requiring recurrent payments.
If you think ACH payments could work for you, check out Yodlee ACH payments. Yodlee’s ACH payments are lightning-fast and reliable and can be easily integrated into your system. They will clear your payments usually on the same day and offer verification services that allow you to know exactly who you’re dealing with, cutting the chances of you getting defrauded almost down to zero.
Try to Accept Payments in Person
When people think about transaction costs, they usually think about payment transaction fees, but fraud and chargebacks have to be accounted for as well. One of the best ways to reduce the chances of those things happening is to accept in-person payments whenever you can. Payments by phone and other methods should only be accepted if it’s crucial to your business model.
Have a Minimum Order Requirement for Electronic Transactions
Another great way to reduce your transaction costs is to lower the number of cash transactions you process. And an easy way to do this is to only allow people to make payments through credit or debit past a certain amount. This amount is up to you, so look around at the competition and see what the standard is.
Go to the Source
If you’re currently working with a small bank to process your payments, you should know right now that they’re probably not processing them in-house. There’s a good chance that they’re dealing with a third-party service that will process these payments for them. As a business owner, you can cut costs by bypassing the bank and looking at services that only process payments.
These are all simple ways that pretty much any business could cut its monthly transaction costs. Your budget and bottom line should not be hampered by your transactions, so always look for ways to keep your expenses as low as possible.