What to Look for in a Payment Processor

Trying to find a payment processor can be a surprisingly difficult process. It’s one of those things that most people don't think about until they find themselves in a position of needing to choose one. However, your payment processor is one of the most vital components of any small business’ infrastructure. The payment processor you choose will impact the amount of money that you need to pay to process transactions.

Choosing a payment processor can seem like a daunting task at first but it is actually remarkably easy, you just need to know what to look out for. Here are the most important factors to consider when you are deciding which payment processor is right for your business.

Cost

There are very few decisions you will have to make when running a business where cost is not a significant factor and your payment processor is no exception. While there will often be some upfront costs associated with installing the infrastructure, it’s the ongoing fees that you really need to pay attention to.

Some payment processors, like PayPal, will take a certain percentage of all the payments that they process. Others prefer to charge users a monthly fee in order to use the platform. And others still, like BlueSnap, use pricing structures that combine elements of both.

Reliability

You don’t ever want to spend money on a service that you can’t rely upon to be there when you need it, but this is especially important with payment processors. Not only do you want to ensure that their platform will be available to you throughout your trading hours, but you also need to ensure that they are charging reasonable fees for the use of their services.

There are loads of great resources online for finding user reviews of particular businesses or services, for example, the Better Business Bureau has plenty of information about BlueSnap, click here to see for yourself.

Customer Support

While you will hopefully choose a payment processor that is reliable and won’t present you with many problems, but you still want to ensure that the payment processor you choose will respond to any issues you have should they arise. Good customer service should be something that you always demand from the businesses you hire, not something that you consider an added bonus.

Responsive customer support won’t just benefit you; it will also benefit your customers. The payment processor you choose should hopefully be using multiple backups and redundancies in order to ensure that if there is a technical issue, they can start using another server instead.

Choosing a payment processor is a very important decision for any business; it is not something that you should enter into without giving it the consideration that it deserves. There are a number of important factors that you need to consider, overlooking any one of them could prove disastrous for you and your business. Make sure that you check out what to expect from a payment processor by looking at user reviews beforehand.