High-Volume Payment Processing: Don’t Do These 3 Things Wrong

Summary: High-volume merchants must carefully manage payment processing to avoid costly mistakes. Key strategies include monitoring fees, understanding high-risk processing, and choosing the best partners.

Main Points:

• Monitor Fees: Regularly review and negotiate payment processing fees.
• High-Risk Processing: Understand the implications of being a high-volume merchant and seek appropriate accounts.
• Choose the Best Partners: Compare and select reliable high-volume payment processing providers to optimize costs and services.

Some businesses are built on volume. When a merchant consistently completes many hundreds or thousands of customer transactions each month, it’s likely that they’ve found a successful business model and built an enthusiastic customer base.  

High sales are an asset, of course. More transactions tend to mean more revenue and, ultimately, profit.  

However, high-volume merchants need to pay special attention to their payment processing needs. These businesses can easily encounter difficulties that don’t apply to merchants with lower sales. Finding the right combination of service providers, tech, and tools to manage high sales volume effectively is crucial.  

Swipesum connects merchants like you with the industry experience and expertise needed to optimize card payments. Our independent consultants provide curated recommendations for service providers, tech, and tools that meet the needs of your business. And, they’ll negotiate on your behalf to keep the fees on your merchant statement more manageable.  

Our consultants will help you improve your approach to payments at no additional cost to your business. Book a free consultation to learn more!  

Now, let’s look at some common payment processing mistakes for high-volume merchants and how to avoid them.

Avoiding Common Issues in High-Volume Credit Card Processing

1. Not Paying Enough Attention to Fees and Other Costs on Your Merchant Statement

High-volume merchants complete an incredible number of sales on a regular basis. That’s great news for their bottom lines, but these substantial sales also come with some unique challenges.  

Processing debit and credit card payments comes at a cost. In the vast majority of agreements between payment processing service providers and merchants, those costs increase with each transaction.  

In other words, high-volume merchants are at a major disadvantage if they don’t pay close attention to merchant fees. The cost of processing payments is more significant for businesses that reliably complete many transactions each week, month, and year.  

The good news is that many payment processing fees can be negotiated in the merchant’s favor. Payment processing is a competitive marketplace, and not every single fee from every single service provider is set in stone. Merchants can negotiate themselves or, by working with experts like the team at Swipesum, have an experienced professional negotiate on their behalf.

2. Not Understanding the Connection Between High-Risk Credit Card Processing and High-Volume Credit Card Processing

The card payments industry views certain business models as representing a high risk. Specifically, the risk of fraud, chargebacks, and other issues that can negatively impact a service provider’s bottom line.  

Sometimes, the high-risk designation applies to certain industries. That includes examples ranging from travel agents to self-service storage providers, as NerdWallet explains. However, large sales volumes, high-value average transactions, and international sales (among other examples) can put high-volume merchants into the high-risk category.  

High-volume businesses that use regular merchant accounts run the risk of account investigations, suspensions, and even terminations.  

Some providers simply don’t want to work with high-volume or high-risk merchants. They’re not equipped to deal with the volume of chargebacks and the potential for fraud. That’s true even if those issues are infrequent in the context of the total number of transactions your business processes.  

While this represents an obstacle to optimizing your payments strategy, it’s a solvable problem.  

High-volume, high-risk payment processing options are available. Many high-volume merchants receive high-volume merchant accounts from providers that allow for a large number of transactions and a similarly high transaction limit in terms of total value.  

These providers understand the issues high-volume merchants face and provide high-volume payment processing solutions in response.  

Such merchant accounts and processing services can sometimes require longer contracts, a more in-depth review of a business’s operations, or more fees (in the merchant’s favor, these can be negotiable).  

However, when the alternative is breaking the terms of an agreement with a traditional provider and losing the ability to process card payments or even money stored in a merchant account, high-volume payment processing solutions are a much better alternative.

3. Not Looking for the Best High-Volume Payment Processing Partners

High-volume merchant accounts aren’t available from every single payment processing service provider. However, there are options for just about every high-volume business. There are enough providers that work with high-volume merchants to give merchants options.  

It can be tempting to think that finding a trustworthy and reliable provider for your high-volume, high-risk merchant account and payment gateway is enough. After all, your business centers on the products or services you sell and keeping customers satisfied, not the intricacies of payment processing.  

This attitude, while understandable in such a large and complex market for payment processing, means leaving money on the table. Yes, finding a suitable provider is enough to keep accepting payments and banking revenue. But it’s not the best move for your business.  

Let the competitive nature of the market work in your favor. Comparing high-volume payment processing providers in terms of cost and service levels can help your business find an effective solution and save money. Of course, negotiations with a potential or current provider can reduce costs as well.  

The main issue business owners and decision-makers face in this context is a lack of in-depth knowledge and experience in the payments industry. The time and effort needed to learn about and effectively compare service providers can take away from core business activities.  

Swipesum brings that payments industry knowledge and experience to the table for your company’s benefit. Our team takes the time to learn about your needs and then curates a shortlist of options for providers, tech, and tools that address those needs. They take the lead in negotiations, too, keeping costs lower and putting more money back into your business.  

Navigating the world of payment processing on your own can be difficult. When your business has specific payment processing needs, that work becomes even more complex.  

Don’t feel like you have to build your high-volume payment processing strategy yourself. Book a free consultation with the experts at Swipesum and learn how we can help.