How a Slow Payment Processor Could Cost You

Payment processing is something that many businesses take for granted. They know it is there and they trust it to take debit and credit card transactions. However, do you know how crucial the speed of your payment processor is to the overall success of your business? While it is not the only factor that can help determine if your business succeeds or fails, it can cost you in these five critical areas.

Customer Loyalty

Do you know how important returning customers are to keeping your sales at a healthy level? This is for two reasons. First, while the number of return customers will depend on your business, up to 40% of a company’s sales may come from return customers. This makes them a critical factor in your overall profit margin. Second, loyal customers are more likely to share stories about a great experience. This can include leaving reviews, rating your business, or recommending you to a friend or relative.

When you have a slow payment processor, customers don’t have as great of an experience as they could. This could make it less likely that they will return to your business again.

Customer Experience

A slow payment processor can also affect your customer’s experience. If a customer has a slow checkout time, it may result in a worse customer experience. When customers have bad experiences, it is less likely that they are going to return. While your quality of goods or services may be bringing them back, if your payment processor continuously worsens their experience, they may stop buying your good or service. Slow payment processing reduces sales in this way but also can reduce the number of new customers that come to check out your good or service.

Reputation

Having a slow payment processor can also damage your reputation. The way it does this is by harming customer experience. When customers are dissatisfied because there is a long check out time, they may share their experience with family, friends, or social media. They can also leave negative reviews on your website. When other people hear about their poor experience, you lose credit as a company that can provide a great customer experience in addition to quality goods or services. This damages the way that potential and current customers view you. Joining a reputable payment processor company, such as Fattmerchant’s payment processor, is extremely important for your sales.

Number of Sales

There are two different ways that a slow payment processor can affect the number of sales. If you have a peak time, your processing system may need to work very quickly. As customer lines grow and you are not able to service them, you lose valuable sales. Additionally, having a slow payment processor damages your customer experience and your reputation. The major problem with this is that it lessens the likelihood that new customers will visit your place of business. It can also affect the way that current customers view you because they are less likely to return to a place of business that their family and friends do not like.

Time

The final way that having a slow payment processor can cost your business is by wasting valuable time. Consider that your payment processor takes 5 seconds longer than your competitor’s. If you make 770 credit/debit card sales in a day, then you are losing 3,850 seconds or approximately 1hr 4min. This adds up to 5 hours and 20 minutes at the end of a 5-day work week and over 260 hours of work after a year.

Now, consider your average hourly salary for employees and think about how much money you are losing. This is an instance where time really is money because those 260+ hours can be spent doing other business activities.