Low Merchant Rates, Transparency, and Thousands of Savings

SharedTEAMS is a membership-based Shared Marketing Department and provides businesses with on-demand access to full scale marketing teams using their SaaS platform. In this case study learn how we built trust through transparency, low merchant processing rates, and ultimately reduced their processing fees, saving them thousands of dollars per month.

The problem, in their words

“Most of our membership fees are billed through credit card transactions. We were paying a very high transaction fee to our previous contractor because our industry and our higher-than-average transaction amount (around $800 per transaction on average) were flagged as higher-risk merchant services.

Additionally, there was an incident where the previous contractor conveyed that we were being placed on a lower rate, which did not occur. We were forced to take legal action to recover the funds that we were erroneously charged.

Therefore, we were looking to enter into a relationship with a merchant services provider that was transparent and upfront about their fees.”   – David Lanagan, Founder

A case for transparency: When interchange fees hit your bottom line

During our discovery phase with SharedTEAMS, it was very apparent the merchant pricing they were getting was different from what they had signed up for and there wasn’t a clear resolution from their payment processor on the horizon.

Together, we quickly identified two main areas that needed to be addressed:

1. Finding an optimal processing solution: a customized solution that wasn’t going to cut into their profit margins (as they were previously paying a high fee for membership charge credit transactions);

2. Trust building: a supportive and transparent relationship where fees and costs are not only fixed but discussed upfront (due to their previous contractor’s lack of transparency plus an erroneous charge that even led to legal action).

Since 2007 our experience has indicated that even when clients and potential clients talk about pricing concerns first, like in the case of SharedTEAMS, price is never the real issue: clients want to work with partners who have their back. In contrast to the churn and burn cycle typical in the payments industry, our true focus is on building long-lasting relationships.

As we often work with small- and medium-sized service-oriented businesses in the online world—businesses just like SharedTEAMS—we know how much they rely on a satisfactory customer experience to make a lasting impression. Payment processing and the way we power merchant payments is an integral part of a positive customer experience and, these days, most customers prefer paying with credit and debit cards, which makes effective online business payment processing one of the key components of long-term business success.

While processing credit cards is not only complex, it can come with a myriad of hidden costs. Worst of all, as SharedTEAMS learned the hard way, not all processing service providers are as straightforward and ethical as they appear, it’s actually pretty common for fees to increase without notice AND, we’re not common. We lock merchant fees in so you don’t have to worry about fee hikes, we want you to focus on your business, your product, and future growth.

The main reason companies should consider interchange rates when accepting credit cards is that credit card fees ultimately come out of the bottom line. Each time a credit card payment is accepted, merchants pay two kinds of fees: a processing fee and a per-transaction fee, some of which go to the credit card company and some of which go to the payment processor.