There is a lot to think about when searching for a Sage payment processing provider. The process is often time consuming and complicated. Many payment processors will tell you that they can offer you the best rates but few will reveal how they set their pricing. Instead, you will often be forced to sift through deliberately confusing merchant statements while trying to find the best rates for your business and discern what hidden fees you are being charged.
Much more important than pricing, however, is the quality of the services and uptime you will receive as well as how the solutions that you choose to adopt fit your individual business needs. Integrated payment processors like REPAY integrate right into your Sage platforms, making it easy, cost effective and time efficient. REPAY focuses first on educating potential clients on their current pricing, reviewing the payment options available to them, and then custom tailoring the right solutions for their business that seamlessly integrate into the systems they already use.
When searching for the right payment processor for your Sage platforms, there are a few important things to look at before you make the switch.
Uptime, Downtime, and Failover
Many merchants who have made the switch to REPAY in recent months have stated that their reason for switching providers was the amount of downtime they suffered with their previous merchant service provider. IT downtime can be costly for your business. It is suspected that it could cost your business upwards of $5,600 for every minute of downtime that your business faces, according to Gartner. IHS Markit reported that businesses could be losing around $700 billion every single year due to IT downtime. REPAY has a 99% uptime rate.
How?
Our partners have data centers all over the US that play a critical component of our failover systems.
Failover: a method of protecting computer systems from failure, in which
standby equipment automatically takes over when the main system fails.
This failover strategy ensures that if one server goes down, the environment is brought up in another server. For example, if REPAY ClickToPay is on Server A and Server A goes down, REPAY ClickToPay shifts to server B, installs automatically, and is up and running again within seconds. Redundancies in our system help to protect our merchants from the risks and costs of downtime. Routing from one server to another is only part of our solution, however. After Server A goes down, our team conducts a post-mortem analysis to figure out what went wrong and how we can prevent the same problem from happening in the future. This is a major component of our 99% uptime along with the dedication of our team and our consistent API response. Properly ensuring smooth transactional processes is key to preventing downtime. If your processor is returning responses that means the system is receiving the request but the responses break down, ending in downtime for merchants.
Price
After ensuring that the processor you select has adequate systems and fail-safes in place to enable your business to run smoothly, you'll want to analyze the rates you are paying. Examining your pricing structure and determining any hidden fees in your current merchant statement is an essential first step. Usually, you will gain access to lower rates simply by integrating payments into your accounting software. Although the numbers vary greatly on an individual basis, our REPAY customers save, on average, 18% when they make the switch.
Level 3 & Interchange Plus
Level 3 processing is also a bonus to your potential savings if you are charging business to business or business to government transactions but you are not yet taking advantage of the Level 3 discounts on interchange. If your business is on a flat rate pricing model, you could be missing out on massive savings with Level 3 for B2B transactions. Access to these lower rates can save your business money every month on transaction fees.
Integration and Automation
Having a processor that enables you to take advantage of Level 3 discounted rates is great; using automated solutions to input the necessary data points with no additional work is even better. Some integrated solutions will not be fully integrated, requiring you to first input the items and populate categories in order to benefit from Level 3 discounts Eliminating manual entry ensures that your business secures the best rates, saves time and money, and reduces the risk of entry error. Your employees should be focusing on what can help grow your business. Your integrated payments solution should facilitate that with a seamless, easy to use experience. If your business would benefit from streamlined operations and lower admin costs, look into automated solutions that are seamlessly and fully integrated into your accounting software.
Support
Another important feature of any payment processing provider is merchant support. It is important that you carefully evaluate your potential processors to determine who has the right customer service and tech support for your business. REPAY has 24/7 live support. If a problem arises for your business at any time of day or night, you would have access to a real human to walk you through getting the help you need.
User Design
Many processors do not provide merchants with centralized reporting. Online management and reporting that is easy to access online and allows for self-service can cut time and confusion from your daily routine. Our fully-integrated and out-of-the-box solutions work seamlessly within Sage and allow 24/7 access to important financial records.
Self-Service
Customers also like the ability to self-serve and pay their invoices online. No payment solution is complete if it does not consider the user experience of the end-customer as well as the merchant. Many payment processors will not offer an integrated online payment portal, or if they do, they will have them available to their clients for a fee. Working with a payment solution offering this functionality, clients can click a button and make payments in seconds, increasing customer satisfaction while getting you paid faster.
REPAY offers an integrated and 100% free payment portal where you can email an invoice to a customer from your Sage ERP, and customers can click on the Pay Now button embedded in the invoice and can pay online in less than 5 minutes. REPAY online payment portal gives clients access to all their outstanding invoices, so they can pay multiple invoices at once via ACH or credit card.
International Processing
Another key point to look for is international processing, especially if you already have customers or potential customers abroad. This is going to make your life much easier and simpler when completing payments. Whether your specific needs are multi-currency or multi-store, you require a payment solution that can encompass the full scope of what your business demands. REPAY offers multi-currency processing.
Security
You need to trust your payment processing provider to protect your business from data breaches and liability. Payment gateways work behind the scenes to securely transfer sensitive credit card data from an online payment portal to the payment processor. REPAY is a fully PCI-DSS compliant credit card payment processing solution for added security against fraud. REPAY’s tokenized credit card data simplifies PCI compliance and stores sensitive customer information encrypted within the REPAY Vault.
Flexibility
What if something goes wrong with your terminal or online portal, or you need to switch processing services overnight? With REPAY, if you have a problem or a question, you have access to top-level engineers who wrote the integration that you’re working on. Our development team can work on your problem and often solve the problem in hours or minutes. The sales rep that signs your account is on standby to answer your questions or escalate your problems through our chain of command. When you process with REPAY, our team of experts is working for you!
Avoid having your business come to a standstill with downtime, poor support or non-integrated solutions. REPAY offers an alternative to the other Sage payment solutions and provides seamless integration to help you save time and money! With 24/7 Live Support and the ability to take you live in 24 hours...Don't be complacent if you are facing challenges with your current provider.
On average, businesses save up to 18% annually by switching to REPAY! What are you waiting for? Don’t take our word for it - read what some of our current customers have to say. One satisfied REPAY customer, Terry Wilhelm, Director of Operations at K&K Interiors, said:
“Working with REPAY is a fast and simple procedure that saves on
expenses such as labor costs, supplies, telephone conversations, etc.”
REPAY takes the stress out of payments and reduces human error when completing transactions. In the long run, this gives you more time to focus on your customers and your business. It can sometimes be weeks or months between the time an order has been taken and when it ships. Automating the process of authorization on the credit card stored in the vault can save you time in completing the order as well as hassle in the future. REPAY helps you process credit cards automatically without additional human intervention, making your life easier and your business better. Secure data protection that comes with the REPAY Vault gives customers the chance to save their information in the vault for any future purchases they may need to complete without storing sensitive data on local servers.
Switch to REPAY today! Contact us for a free discovery call to review your Sage payment needs. We can get you up and running fast!