A penny saved is a penny earned, and right now, who isn’t counting their pennies?

As a small or medium business owner, you know how quickly you can enhance your bottom line by adding just a couple cents to the cost of each item or service you sell. Conversely, by using the most efficient payment processing practices, you can also achieve the lowest fees possible for each transaction – which can potentially add up to much more savings than pennies on the dollar!

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can optimize payment acceptance and save money.

Savings Through Commercial Card Optimization
Commercial cards are credit cards employers provide their employees to make purchases on behalf of their company. What if there was a way to reduce your payment card acceptance fees by collecting and transmitting additional payment transaction data for commercial card purchases without changing anything? With our Commercial Card Optimization solution, you can potentially reduce your processing rates by 0.4%-1.0% per commercial card transaction. Read more.

Savings Through Credit Card Cost Control
Our Credit Card Cost Control (C4) program is an easy-to-use surcharge system that effectively brings your credit card acceptance costs to zero. A business registered with the card brands to collect a surgarge, also notifies their credit card users of the surcharge cost prior to completing the payment. The cardholder can then elect to use a different form of payment that will not incur the surcharge. If the cardholder continues with the credit card payment, a surcharge amount is added to the final transaction total. The business only pays a flat rate of 1 percent, plus 25 cents for debit card transactions. Read more.

Savings Through Debit Card Management
When customers paying with a debit card choose to validate the transaction by entering a PIN instead of a signature, you can lower your overall cost of payment acceptance by securing a lower PIN debit processing rate. Additionally, use of a PIN with debit payment offers cardholder validation that can help stop fraudulent use before the debit transaction is authorized or settled. PIN debit validation also helps reduce improper chargebacks. Read more.

Savings Through Chargeback Mitigation
Transactions disputed by the cardholder or the card issuer can be costly. There may be many reasons for chargebacks, but the most common are returned merchandise, terminated services, disputes, errors or fraud. If the credit card issuer considers the dispute valid, the business is required to refund the amount of the transaction plus a chargeback fee to their payment processor. The exposure your business has to fraud depends on your business policies, operational practices, fraud prevention and detection tools, security controls, and the type of products or services you provide. Check out our Chargeback Guide for tips.

We can help you identify the combination of payment optimization methods that make sense for your business and could potentially save you money. Give us a call at 360.956.7279 to find out more.

This article was originally published in Elavon’s Payment Smart newsletter. The Washington Hospitality Association’s payments processing system is backed by U.S. Bank/Elavon. Click here to learn more about the program.


1Source is Elavon processing statistics