Understanding What Integrated Payments Solutions Are

Integrated payments can help your clients more effectively and completely deliver important services to their own customers. More specifically, integrated payment systems offer a simple and reliable payment experience for those end users.

Your clients already count on your software to help them manage their operations. That’s true whether it’s operating youth sports leagues, managing a specific type of business, or invoicing customers. Incorporating payments into your solution creates a more complete, useful, and valuable process.

At the same time, integrated payments can also become a source of revenue for your business. While it requires favorable terms, including a high revenue share, it’s entirely possible to access this valuable benefit.

Keep reading to learn more about integrated payment services, from evaluating vendors and negotiating with them to engineering expectations.

Swipesum can help your business find the best possible integrated payment solutions for its unique needs.  As independent, provider-agnostic consultants, we exclusively focus on supporting your company throughout the process.

We’ll offer knowledgeable support in negotiations, source technical capabilities, redline partnership agreements, and so much more. Want to find out how we can guide your enterprise toward a successful, stable, and secure integrated payment solution? Schedule a free consultation today.

Why Choose an Integrated Payment Solution?

Integrated payments offer exactly that. It’s a payment process that’s ingrained in your SaaS platform. Your own customer’s clients — the software’s end users — benefit from a native payment process within a system they already use.

That’s a much more efficient experience than the one offered by software that has to redirect users to an external processor, like Stripe. The added steps of setting up a Stripe account, and the disruption caused by leaving a familiar app or program, lead to a customer experience that’s less than optimal. 

The Forbes Business Council highlights a range of other benefits that integrated payments provide. That includes everything from more efficient invoicing to something we’ve already highlighted: the ability to earn revenue simply by offering this functionality.

Evaluating Integrated Payment Vendors

Finding the right partner is crucial for delivering value to your customers — and for driving integrated payments revenue to your organization. That means your business has to ask certain questions of potential partners. Ensuring there’s a good fit between your needs and a potential partner’s capabilities is crucial.

Where should you start? Technical considerations and compatibility are foundational. 

Even the best revenue split and most favorable terms can’t overcome a lack of relevant APIs and technical documentation. Make sure every provider you seriously consider can provide the software needed for success. If your customers collect in-person payments, hardware has to be part of the conversation, too.

With the crucial compatibility issue addressed, pricing and customer service negotiations take center stage. We’ll take a closer look at rates, revenue splits, and similar financial considerations in the next section. In the meantime, we’ll emphasize that customer service can’t be overlooked.

There’s so much variation in this aspect of integrated payments that your business needs a high level of clarity before moving forward. Some integrated merchant services providers will handle customer service themselves. Look into their reputation — search for online reviews and complaints. 

Others will require your company to build out a payments team and handle customer service itself. Is that something your business is equipped to handle? In some cases, favorable terms and a strong revenue split could make taking on this part of business operations worth it. In many other instances, however, companies need a provider that can provide service and support along with the integrated payment solution itself.

Generating Revenue From Integrated Payment Solutions

How do businesses make money from offering an integrated payment solution in their SaaS platform? By negotiating with a merchant services provider to receive part of the fixed and percentage-based fees that go along with each transaction. Your company delivers these transactions to the provider. Why shouldn’t it share in some of the revenue?

There are plenty of variables to consider. That includes keeping costs within an acceptable range for end-users and the hard limits of your provider at the bargaining table.

In our experience, it’s easy even for a business to reliably bring in a little revenue from each and every transaction. Those small amounts add up over time. That’s true even when trying to keep end-user costs lower than other processing options, like Stripe. In these cases, it’s realistic to earn about 0.5-0.75% of each transaction’s total value. 

While that may only amount to a few cents for smaller transactions, the value adds up over time. That’s especially true if your clients process a large volume of payments. With effective negotiations and a dependable provider for your integrated payment solution, you can count on revenue with only a small amount of work in return.

Integrated Payment Solutions: Engineering Expectations

Setting up an integrated payment solution and integrating it into your existing SaaS platform can take a significant amount of time. In our experience, it’s a 4-12 week project for a team of two software engineers. However, you don’t have to count on internal resources or bring new staff on board for successful implementation.

At Swipesum, our services include engineering. Our team has valuable past experience helping other companies accomplish this same goal. We can streamline the process, delivering a significantly faster engineering timeline. The result is a faster implementation that benefits your business, your customers, and their end users.

Expert Independent Consultants Exclusively Focused on Your Integrated Payment Needs

When you partner with Swipesum for integrated payments consulting, you can count on robust support throughout the process. 

Our team helps you find the best integrated payment solution, sources needed technical capabilities, and offers assistance throughout negotiations. We reduce the burden on your own resources while delivering an integrated payment solution that meets and exceeds your needs.

Learn more about the benefits of bringing in an expert consultant to support the move to an integrated payment solution: Book your free consultation today!