How retailers can move at the speed of innovation with microservices

POS Solutions

Article | April 4, 2024

Marketplace optimization serves as a gold mine for businesses, helping them attain key marketing goals. Read the article to discover leading marketplace optimization tools for increased sales and ROI. Contents 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Market Dominance 4.1 Stackline 4.2 Perpetua 4.3 Teikametrics 4.4 Quartile 4.5 Wiser Solutions 4.6 Intentwise 4.7 CommerceIQ 4.8 Feedvisor 4.9 A2X 4.10 eDesk 5. Final Thoughts 1. Marketplace Optimization: The Tale of Visibility Marketplace optimization (MPO) enables businesses to enhance their selling capabilities and rank higher on search engines, leveraging diverse signals like search keywords, product listings, seller metrics, etc. The MPO process essentially includes multiple best practices, such as optimizing product descriptions, fine-tuning advertisements, and employing locational intelligence, which together focus on ensuring superior execution of businesses’ selling operations. The global online marketplace optimization tools market size is projected to touch USD 2159.22 million by the end of 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 19.32% during the forecast period. [Source: Business Research Insights] Significantly, as catalysts for greater brand visibility and POS strategies, today’s leading marketplace optimization tools help B2B businesses elevate their e-commerce platforms, delivering the best results and increased customer satisfaction. With such notable benefits and prominence, the MPO process has become a shining protagonist in B2B's tale of visibility. 2. Core Benefits of Marketplace Optimization Along with increased website traffic, conformity to prominent sales acceleration trends, and enhanced customer engagement, marketplace optimization tools usher in many advantages for B2B businesses. The prominent merits of these include: Better Performances With actionable insights into businesses, marketplace optimization ensures better e-commerce performances, allowing companies to make end-to-end forecasts and informed marketing decisions. Enhanced Brand Visibility The MPO processes help businesses improve quality scores for search keywords and fine-tune their product listings. It also heightens their brand presence across different filters and categories, enabling them to reach wider audiences. Targeted Marketing By incorporating processes like locational intelligence, marketplace optimization further makes for precision in lead targeting and efficient resource allocation, ensuring increased conversion rates and brand loyalty. Improved POS Tactics Businesses can augment their pricing and inventory management processes with marketplace optimization, ensuring optimized POS strategies. This optimization enables companies to set attractive prices and maintain the right products in stock, rendering the checkout processes effortless for buyers. Customized Ad Campaigns With an effective MPO strategy, companies can also gain beneficial insights into the behavior of target audience segments. Such information, in turn, helps businesses create laser-focused campaigns with high-performing keywords, optimized content, and attractive product listings. Greater Profitability Marketplace optimization promises higher sales and lead conversion rates. It further promotes cross-selling and upselling through personalized advertisements, ushering in significant returns and meeting businesses’ marketplace objectives. 3. Boosting POS Strategies with Location Intelligence In today’s marketing world, location intelligence has emerged as an integral part of MPO processes, empowering businesses to boost their productivity and potentially earn peak financial gains. By leveraging geospatial data or location intelligence, companies can effortlessly assess crucial factors like customer demographics, economic factors, product demand, and competitor actions, which enable them to strategically optimize their e-commerce strategies for enhanced sales. Furthermore, the process enables companies to understand purchase behavior and customize their products and pricing according to regions, ensuring a practical POS approach and driving higher sales. From enhanced delivery logistics and product offerings to personalized marketing endeavors and customer experiences, location intelligence effectively promises multiple benefits to businesses and remains an essential tool for optimizing digital marketplaces. 4. Top 10 Best-selling Optimization Tools for Marketplace Dominance With prominent marketplace technology and tools, businesses successfully attain unparalleled customer confidence and expand their reach, enhancing the way online commerce works. Here’s a list of the top 10 best-selling optimization tools for inimitable marketplace success: 4.1 Stackline Launched in 2014, Stackline is a comprehensive e-commerce optimization tool for retailers and brands in the digital marketplace. It offers businesses crucial MPO signals, such as revenue metrics, commerce insights, and interaction data, enabling them to make informed decisions and POS strategies related to product pricing and stock availability. The AI-powered optimization tool Stackline further boasts multiple promising features that include: Market Insights: Stackline enhances businesses' marketing intelligence by providing comprehensive insights into buyers' behaviors, preferences, and trends. It enables companies to understand markets and engage their audiences for better returns. A Multi-retailer CRM: Through a notable multi-retailer CRM, the marketplace optimization tool empowers businesses to undertake customized marketing efforts, as customer data can be centralized and managed in the system for various MPO processes, including assessment of rating and reviews, targeted surveys, collection of customer feedback, and so on. Optimization of Ads: With Stackline, e-commerce companies can create powerful advertisements and campaigns, simplifying their advertising efforts and optimizing advertisement expenditure. Performance Monitoring: Stackline further lets businesses get a complete view of their e-commerce business data, including sales performance. It allows users to monitor and analyze crucial parameters, driving peak financial gains and enabling informed decisions. Handling Product Listings: The marketplace optimization tool also offers solutions for product listing management across multiple digital platforms, ensuring reliability, preciseness, and enhanced POS tactics. 4.2 Perpetua Perpetua is an advanced optimization tool for marketplace that serves the top e-commerce platforms globally. The tool primarily focuses on optimizing businesses’ advertising efforts, empowering them to attain their strategic goals by highlighting crucial metrics and assessing trends through next-generation machine learning and advanced algorithms. With easy task automation and crucial marketplace insights, Perpetua helps businesses ensure true e-commerce success. The chief features of the tool include: Advertisement Intelligence: With Perpetua, businesses can gain complete advertising intelligence, as the tool provides users with crucial marketplace data and insights. This data empowers them to show suitable ads to the right people on major e-commerce platforms, further enhancing sales and revenues. Simplification and Automation of Advertising Workflows: Optimizing processes like video and display advertising across leading marketplaces, Perpetua also helps businesses automate tasks and streamline their workflows. Such automation allows companies to implement more efficient advertisement strategies and customize their ads for better results and investment efficiency. Marketplace Insights: By rendering comprehensive insights into market performance, sales trends, competitors, market developments, and customers’ behavior at the POS, Perpetua effectively strengthens retailers’ decision-making processes, helping them devise better advertising techniques and driving higher ROI. Bidding Algorithms for Precise Targeting: Through intelligent bidding algorithms, Perpetua enables businesses to analyze crucial factors such as market trends and customer demographics, and helps them reach their target audiences with extraordinary precision. It offers companies tailored suggestions based on these analyses, ensuring the practical usage of advertising budget and better impact of ad campaigns. Comprehensive Sales Analytics: Showcasing the effectiveness of businesses’ advertisement expenditure, Perpetua’s all-inclusive sales analysis feature lets retailers leverage crucial insights into their sales performance, helping them improve their advertisement approach. 4.3 Teikametrics Facilitating innovative advertising, Teikametrics is a revolutionary e-commerce optimization tool that incorporates AI technology to help companies thrive on major e-commerce platforms. It renders solutions for advertisement optimization, marketplace insights, and inventory management for small businesses and established enterprises. Notably, with its impressive Flywheel 2.0 technology, the powerful optimization tool automates advertisement bidding processes and ensures enhanced brand visibility. Teikametrics shines with its unique selling proposition, promising a robust optimization tool with the following key attributes: AI-driven Optimization: Teikametrics leverages artificial intelligence to analyze market trends and customer behavior and subsequently augments businesses' advertisement campaigns, empowering them to make the most of these campaigns. Flywheel 2.0 Technology: The tool’s advanced Flywheel 2.0 technology helps companies make intelligent bids on ad placements, ensuring greater brand awareness and enhanced business sales. Significantly, by automating crucial advertising tasks, it streamlines the ad campaign processes and helps businesses drive higher ROI. Effective Inventory Management and POS Techniques: With Teikametrics, businesses can clearly understand stock requirements and high-performing products. Correspondingly, the forward-looking tool ensures the availability of product stocks in the right amounts at the POS locations, enabling customers to buy what they like and enhancing businesses' POS techniques. Powerful Market Insights: Teikametrics provides businesses with crucial information and insights related to competitors’ actions, market trends, and customer preferences, allowing for informed decision-making and strategy building. 4.4 Quartile Being a robust optimizer of retail media, Quartile utilizes patented AI technology to help e-commerce enterprises fine-tune their digital advertising efforts across prominent platforms. The tool carefully filters through large data sets, automating crucial advertisement tasks to amplify the companies’ returns on investment. Emphasizing the correct ad placement and cross-platform advertisement optimization, the advanced tool further allows enviable precision targeting to businesses. Correspondingly, the key highlights of the innovative marketplace optimization tool include: Automatic, Purpose-Driven Ad Optimization: Leveraging advanced AI technology, Quartile helps users define their optimization goals and streamlines their efforts automatically without requiring manual updates. With the forward-looking tool, businesses can also digitize their ad bidding strategies, streamline ad placements, and search relevant keywords, elevating the efficiency of their ad spend. Privately-owned Machine Learning Innovations: The promising optimization tool for marketplace boasts six proprietary machine learning technologies that companies can leverage to promptly elevate their e-commerce publicity initiatives. Integration of Digital and Retail Media Campaign: Quartile allows businesses to effortlessly combine their digital and retail media campaign optimization within a single platform. This eliminates the need for firms to traverse different platforms separately. It also enables them to augment their brand presence and simplify operations with advanced campaign management tools and analytics from a single interface. Holistic Performance and Attribution Reports: With Quartile, companies can get a comprehensive performance overview comprising relevant insights into sales drivers and attribution reports and make informed decisions or adjust their strategies based on such information. 4.5 Wiser Solutions Wiser Solutions, a leader in commerce execution SaaS products, has an impressive commerce execution suite that facilitates intelligent decision-making and renders a comprehensive view of businesses’ performance. Combining data from offline and online stores, the tool gives companies essential insights, helping them draw augmented sales and profits. Facilitating optimized commerce execution, Wiser Solutions comprises the following notable features: Relevant Pricing Data: By providing actionable pricing data, Wiser Solutions helps businesses enhance their pricing and POS strategies, allowing retailers to promptly evaluate competitor prices, market trends, and other relevant factors, make real-time decisions, and revise product prices to maximize profitability. Comprehensive View of Retail with Multiple Data Sources: Combining data from different sources, such as e-commerce platforms and offline stores, the pioneering tool renders a complete view of the retail environment to businesses, entailing required stock levels, market trends, and customer behavior. In-store Operations Monitoring: Wiser Solutions helps companies effectively carry out core in-store tasks such as pricing products, placing promotional material, and arranging product displays. This helps them render exceptional shopping experiences to customers and ensure consistent brand presence across channels. Smart Decision-making: Wiser’s impressive array of tools comprises advanced analytics that let users leverage real-time insights into competitor strategies, market trends, etc. and make well-informed decisions based on them. The tool, driven by proprietary algorithms, helps businesses drive sales and widen their market shares. Better Product Assortments: With Wiser Solutions, companies can offer customers the most attractive mix of products and ensure that these products don’t run out of stock. Therefore, the tool helps businesses optimize product assortment, driving sales and providing better POS decisions. 4.6 Intentwise Intentwise is an exhaustive marketplace optimization tool that enables retailers to enhance and streamline their advertising endeavors on leading online e-commerce platforms. Focused on elevating pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, it boasts striking components like analytics cloud, ad optimizer, and so on, increasing return on advertising spend (ROAS) and facilitating successful campaign management. Committed to its endeavor of augmenting advertisement ROI, Intentwise offers various benefits to users: Robust Ad Optimization Engine: Harnessing AI and machine learning algorithms, Intentwise empowers businesses to evaluate their advertisement performance data in real time and further renders actionable suggestions related to keyword optimization, budget allocation, and keyword bidding, which could be implemented either manually or automatically. It also provides competitor insights and AI-powered audits for ad campaigns. Overview Dashboard: With Intentwise, companies get a detailed view of crucial ad metrics, such as conversion rates, total expenditure, impressions and clicks. The comprehensive data allows for better decision-making, time and effort savings, enhanced advertising strategies, and attainment of marketing goals. Flexible Reporting Tools: Intentwise further enables businesses to effortlessly tailor their reports according to their preferences and needs. This customization helps companies undertake detailed analysis, better understand their performance metrics, and make vital decisions. Optimized Ad Spend: To ensure maximum ad spend efficiency, businesses leveraging Intentwise can notably fine-tune their campaign management and bidding strategies based on crucial factors of the retail environment, like market conditions and competitor behavior. Superlative Data Visualization: Users can view and evaluate data with a single click, which showcases a clear distinction between brand and non-brand keywords. Furthermore, the tool converts foreign currency into the user’s local currency, rendering the data comparison easier. The enhanced data visualization importantly improves performance and ensures greater precision in decision-making. 4.7 CommerceIQ Empowering brands to effortlessly succeed in the digital marketplace, CommerceIQ is a comprehensive marketplace optimization tool that enhances all aspects of a brand's retail, such as marketing, sales, and supply chain administration. The tool essentially promises high profitability and business growth through task automation, data analytics, and more. Characterized by relentless, ongoing innovation, CommerceIQ is an all-encompassing tool that benefits retailers through: Progressive Data Evaluation: Using advanced algorithms, CommerceIQ allows businesses to analyze large sets of data related to competitors' actions and consumer behavior, which helps companies make strategically intelligent decisions. AI-Powered Ad Solutions: With CommerceIQ's AI-powered ad solutions, businesses can optimize their advertisement expenditure by real-time bid adjustments, using strong keywords, and allotting advertising funds to top-performing campaigns for improved brand visibility and revenue generation. Task Automation: From product pricing adjustments to advertisement bid management, CommerceIQ automates significant advertising tasks, enabling businesses to carry them out quickly and more efficiently. Enhanced Inventory and Supply Chain Management: By predicting inventory requirements and helping businesses maintain the proper stock levels, Commerce IQ ensures that the demands of customers are invariably met at companies' POS locations. Automated Tools for Effective Sales Management: CommerceIQ's innovative features further elevate businesses' sales operations, protecting brands' reputations from third-party sellers and preventing out-of-stock situations and income loss. 4.8 Feedvisor Feedvisor is an AI-first marketplace optimization tool that strengthens businesses through its comprehensive suite of services. The tool renders actionable insights to brands and sellers, empowering them to optimize their pricing techniques, advertisement campaigns, brand management, and content. Reflecting the significance of data-driven intelligence, Feedvisor helps businesses drive true success through its striking features like: Patented Technology for Dynamic Pricing: The comprehensive tool helps businesses fine-tune their product prices, delivering real-time market data, demand forecasting, and competitive analysis for data-backed decisions. AI-driven Optimized Ads: Feedvisor further elevates sponsored ads and DSP campaigns by helping sellers align these campaigns with product prices and promotions. Correspondingly, the tool allows businesses to leverage the most effective keywords for their ads and modifies bids according to conversion rate trends and traffic. Unmatched Market Intelligence: With Feedvisor, businesses get unparalleled marketing intelligence, as the tool offers comprehensive dashboards and data-backed insights to companies, which allow them to understand market trends, competition, and SKU-level performance. A Splendid Suite of Services: Rendering agency-like business and marketing services to clients, the advanced marketplace optimization tool strengthens businesses through various solutions, including inventory management, counterfeit removal, content listing optimization, reputation management, etc. 4.9 A2X Simplifying ecommerce accounting for businesses, A2X was established in 2014 with impressive integration capabilities and the ultimate aim of helping companies reconcile their revenues correctly. Combining effortlessly with various accounting software, A2X helps businesses gain accurate financial information for well-informed decision-making. The principal features of the A2X marketplace optimization tool include: Automated Accounting Tasks: Ensuring the accurate recording of financial information, A2X streamlines accounting processes by automating tasks such as importing and categorizing transactions. Such automation effectively curtails errors associated with manual data entries, rendering an accurate financial picture to business enterprises. Complete Accessibility: The advanced optimization tool further focuses on rendering high accessibility, ensuring that correct and up-to-date financial information remains accessible to all stakeholders, including bookkeepers, accounting firms, and businesses. Elevated Transparency: The forward-looking A2X tool enhances transparency by delivering accurate financials to stakeholders. This allows businesses to clearly understand their operational effectiveness and make insightful decisions. Scalability: From start-ups to big businesses, A2X addresses the unique needs of companies of varying sizes. The tool's high scalability allows businesses to effortlessly leverage it, as it can grow alongside them to meet changing demands and requirements. 4.10 eDesk With an emphasis on augmenting customer experiences, xSellco’s eDesk offers a vast array of e-commerce tools to brands and retailers, which enable them to increase their response rates and work more efficiently. Facilitating effective communication and intelligent decision-making, the comprehensive tool further offers smart response recommendations to businesses through AI automation. From enhanced customer satisfaction to seamless integrations, the chief elements of eDesk include: Smart Inbox: By consolidating customer queries from different sources, such as social media, marketplaces, and web stores, eDesk ensures unified customer support. It empowers businesses to manage all of their sales and customer messages in a single place for more effective communication. Impressive Integrations: Effortlessly connecting with over 200 platforms like web stores, marketplaces, and social networks, eDesk possesses striking integration capabilities, which allow businesses to gain comprehensive order information. Need-based Message Sorting: Automatically prioritizing messages based on business needs, eDesk ensures prompt response to urgent messages, streamlining workflows and augmenting the overall customer experience. Integrated Analytics: With eDesk, businesses can leverage comprehensive insights on support metrics and customer dealings from various data sources to understand customer demands and trends and enhance customer support services. 5. Final Thoughts Marketplace optimization promises greater visibility and e-commerce excellence to retailers and brands worldwide. Importantly, employing diverse best practices and signals, online marketplace tools empower businesses through ad optimization, workflow streamlining, enhanced selling capabilities, and so on. With processes like location intelligence, digital marketers further endeavor to improve the efficiency of their POS strategies. Yet, one can expect a greater emphasis on the use of such processes along with AI and machine learning in the time to come. Future trends in MPOs will especially witness businesses ensuring enhanced immersive experiences for customers through AR and VR. Furthermore, ethical commerce, sustainability, influencer marketing, predictive analytics, and multi-channel integration would continue to hold great prominence, helping businesses make the most beneficial decisions and thereby unlock true business success.

POS Solutions, POS Retail

Article | January 12, 2024

Digital innovations continue to be a driving force in changing how people make and receive payments. Cash registers are becoming obsolete as business owners now seek to achieve greater flexibility and control. Similarly, the days of basic systems and stationary credit card leaders are long gone. POS systems for restaurants are changing, evolving, and morphing in response to the demands of restaurateurs and other hospitality business owners for features that did not exist 10 years ago. Impact of mPOS on Restaurants The emerging startup business of mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) systems enables clean features to be considered in the overall restaurant-oriented design at a reasonable cost and with a lesser amount of time and effort. With mPOS systems, restaurants can enhance and improve their operational environment. By opening the gates of traditional POS systems to external developers and the cloud, restaurant owners have ample opportunities to streamline existing processes, such as coupon redemption, and implement entirely new initiatives, like location-based marketing. The ability of the mPOS solutions to provide versatility to restaurant payment systems is one of their greatest benefits. Using a portable device equipped with POS software, waitstaff can print food orders for the kitchen, create customer bills, and accept payments from a variety of options such as QR codes, UPI, debit cards, mobile wallets, and many others. At the same time, these POS systems can facilitate communication between various restaurant departments. For instance, every order can feed information in real-time, allowing for the automatic tracking of inventory levels. In many instances, point-of-sale systems can also manage restaurant reservations. The Wave of the Future In recent years, the introduction of new technologies has enabled smart business solutions, such as mobile point of sale (mPOS), which have pushed the hospitality industry to achieve higher levels of internal expertise in core operational areas. The restaurant sector has long been a creative space that caters to consumers' and cultures' ever-changing tastes. There is now an embrace of technology that customizes the customer experience in unimaginable ways. Restaurant POS systems will play a prominent role in enabling these hospitality spaces to introduce new ways of serving food to customers, in the coming years, providing opportunities for POS solution providers to launch advanced restaurant POS systems and capitalize on them.

POS Solutions, POS Retail, Ecommerce Merchandising

Article | June 10, 2024

Running a small business requires a tight eye on profits. More than likely, you will face scenarios in which you incur higher transaction fees you didn’t expect and could have avoided in the first place. Knowing how to navigate processing fees is a key part of your success. Whether you run a single location, a multi-location business, or even a mobile business, avoiding unnecessary fees should be part of the game plan. Unfortunately, less-than-reputable POS providers are out there, and understanding fees associated with taking payment from customers isn’t easy, but knowing what to look for will help. In this article, we cover fees to keep an eye on and how to save more on your processing fees. How To Avoid Paying Unnecessary Credit Card Processing Fees Unfortunately, if you want to accept credit and debit cards as a form of payment in your business, you’re going to experience processing fees. The financial benefits outweigh the transaction costs, but you can still save some money on your POS system and credit card processing. Negotiate Your Processing Fees The reason it can be so hard to understand the actual cost of processing fees is that many merchant service providers bury fees in the fine print, and these fees can come back to haunt you. In general, the more upfront a company is about all its charges, the more trustworthy and reliable they are because they have nothing to hide, and typically those rates will be fair. But it also helps to keep an eye on certain aspects of a contract. You can then negotiate them or repackage services to boost your profits. Transaction Fees: Choose The Right Plan When setting up your contract, you are given the option of a range of credit card pricing plans. Here are three of the most common pricing models. Interchange Plus Fee Pricing This option offers different transaction rates for different card types, bank issuers, methods of transactions, and more. By understanding these fees when processing transactions, you can benefit financially by encouraging the usage of certain cards or procedures that are least costly. Tiered Pricing In this scenario, you are charged different rates for different tiers created by your provider. It’s important to evaluate this option carefully because most transactions can fall into a less favorable tier rate. Flat-fee Structure Pricing This fee allows for one charge for card-present (CP) transactions and another for card-not-present (CNP) transactions, regardless of card type. This predictable, one-rate pricing model is easy to follow, allowing you to encourage a lower cents-per-transaction option and formulate special pricing deals. However flat-rate can sometimes come out as more expensive than interchange-plus pricing. How To Avoid Monthly PCI Compliance Charges A semi-regular fee many merchants run into is not falling in line with PCI Compliant in how they handle payment information. Being PCI compliant means maintaining important standards for customer data protection, and it is taken seriously. Compliance is required for major credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard and is becoming more popular as businesses continue to shift to online sales. Rule enforcement is most often the responsibility of payment processing companies. Your provider will charge you two fees: a PCI compliance fee – which is once a year – and a PCI non-compliance fee – which occurs every month you have not completed your yearly PCI Compliance audit. Providers are free to charge however much they like for each service, and it can range anywhere between $30-$99 a month. Monthly charges are done both directly or indirectly via higher monthly fees, processing rates, or both. In some cases, the charges begin months after originally signing up with the processors hoping you won’t keep a close eye on all your ongoing processing fees. As a merchant service provider, we at BNG Point-Of-Sale have a long and reliable history in helping our customers practice PCI Compliance within their business and avoid non-compliance fees. PCI Compliance is necessary and it does require some work by the processors, so the charges aren’t a hoax, but there are some ways to keep costs down: You can take on the responsibility of PCI Compliance yourself and forgo the processor’s fee; however, you will be on your own if issues arise. In today’s world of increasing e-commerce, it’s not recommended. You can prevent the risk of non-compliance fees by working with companies that handle compliance internally. If they (not you) are the source of customer purchasing data, they are automatically in charge of it. Square and PayPal are examples of companies that handle all PCI Compliance, and we often account for these services when onboarding our customers and annually remind them to follow PCI Compliance. At first glance, it may appear you are not charged by these companies for compliance and non-compliance, but in reality, compliance is still built into the standard fee for service; you just won’t see it specified. Still, you won’t be responsible for non-compliance fees since they own the data and are fully responsible for it. The amount of compliance required of your business depends on how you take in payment and store customer data. Since processors have numerous clients and prefer not to get specific about it, they may charge a basic fee to cover most issues. This means you could be overpaying, so it’s a good area to evaluate this price of the packaged service vs. when it is priced individually. There may be companies that don’t charge for compliance, but they are rare and may be suspect. In most cases, any free compliance is covered with higher fees in other areas. How To Avoid Chargeback Fees Chargeback fees should be avoided since they are more expensive than traditional transaction fees – especially if you are categorized as a “high risk” client. The first step is to avoid chargebacks in the first place. Chargebacks can be the result of sales errors by you and your team, a misunderstanding by the customer, or the result of identity theft. Here are some ways to combat each. Reduce Transaction Errors Know when to stop a transaction. If an error occurs, push the cancel/hold button inside the transaction. If you are unable to do this, the transaction has already been claimed by the processing company. Accurately process credits as credits and sales as sales. Receive an Authorization Approval Code (AAC) before running a transaction. Before batching your credit card processing at the end of the day, review all charges to verify all charges are correct and not duplicated. Keeping this as an active daily routine can prevent costly mistakes. Ensure shipped items arrive to the customer to avoid disputes. Select the “ship product to billing address” to alleviate data error. Keep Records Of Voids Provide records to your customer of any proof of voids and include companion documentation for any disputes showing details of each purchase. Decrease Risk Of Theft If your processor charges more for card-not-present transactions, which most do, it’s because the risk of theft is higher. By requiring a driver’s license and signature and doing manually keyed-in card payments in person rather than over the phone, you lower the risk and enjoy lower charges per transaction. Try to avoid non-qualified processing (when a card isn’t present or keyed or is missing billing information.) This type of processing is considered a high-risk factor, and processors charge accordingly. When Possible, Run Orders On Debit Cards Debit cards are considered a lower risk than credit cards and, in turn, the transaction rates are quite a bit less. This has mostly to do with the fact the purchase is a direct bank-to-bank transaction, but other factors make a difference such as PIN verification and signature requirements, bringing these purchases into a lower risk category. And typically the rates hold. You will still experience rate differences among debit cards related to how the purchases are conducted and who the issuing bank is. Special incentives such as loyalty programs for debit card users help to easily boost profits. A Final Thought On Keeping Processing Fees Low As you can see, several variables can affect your processing rates. From fines to the pricing model your merchant service provider recommends, there’s a lot to consider. As tempting as it can be to just try and find the cheapest option, be careful going with the lowest bidder. Remember, all POS and payment processing providers have to make some money to cover the costs of support their merchants. If you choose a processor with incredibly low fees, you run the risk of getting what you pay for when it comes to supporting your business. If you’re not sure if you’re overpaying on your processing fees and want a free analysis, let our team review your current monthly statements and we’ll let you know if you’re getting a good deal or not.

Article | October 16, 2020

In 2004, Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Luke established an online website to sell snowboards. They tried a bunch of online store builders but were not satisfied with the status quo. So, they decided to build a tool that could operate their website. Soon, they realized that the tool was more powerful than the website's business. And hence, Shopify was born. Eventually, Shopify became one of the largest eCommerce store builders in the world. By 2009, the company had $100 million in sales and decided to launch its own API as well as an app store. More than a decade later, Shopify is now supporting over 800,000 stores globally and is a $125 billion company. While the company has shown remarkable growth in its business, it would be ignorant to say the market's needs have been fulfilled by the Shopify platform. Shopify's eCommerce platform works for a lot of businesses, but that does not mean it will work for every business. Here is why Shopify is Not the Right Fit for Every Business: Shopify's growth over the years shows that the company has taken several steps to address the market's inherent needs. However, the presence of several other companies and the issues still faced by merchants show some significant gaps in Shopify's offerings: 1. Cost of Setting Up: Each price-point offers a fixed set of features and functionalities. If you want anything over and above that, you will have to buy the subsequent package. For instance – something as conventional as a Gift Card is not available in the $29 per month package; to get it activated, pay as much as $299 per month. 2. Cost of Operations: The additional functionalities and features cost extra in your package. Even basic features like transaction or credit card processing attract an additional fee. To add to that, you have to purchase the app to activate the feature from the Shopify app store. Even though some apps are free, the apps that offer maximum value tend to cost north of $39.99 per month. 3. Limited and Expensive Themes: The entire Shopify store has a total of 73 themes, with the prices going as high as $180 a theme. This means that as a merchant, even after paying the high price, you may end up with an eCommerce platform that hardly stands out from the crowd. In short, while Shopify was started with great intentions, the cost of using it has started outweighing the probable value it has to offer. This issue gets further highlighted when one starts looking at the Shopify alternatives. Best Alternatives of Shopify While Shopify suits the needs of a certain set of merchants, here are the alternatives that can suit the merchants looking for more tailored, affordable, or customizable solutions: 1. Quick eSelling Quick eSelling is one of the most affordable and easy to deploy ecommerce store builder among the Shopify alternatives. It can be deployed in under 10 minutes for the basic variant. Its free variant has some prolific features like a native Android app, responsive website, and a catalog that can support up to 1000 products. The free package requires a 5% transaction fee, which gets eliminated the moment you upgrade to a paid plan. All the paid plans have a fixed monthly fee and no setup costs. The list of standard features includes a wide set of functionalities like customizable web-store themes, SMS & Email marketing, comprehensive payment gateway integrations, detailed analytics reports, inventory management systems, social media plugins, discount coupon codes, and even live chat. The premium package which costs around 50% the price of the $299 Shopify package, comes with a dedicated account manager and enterprise-level integrations. Ideal for: Merchants who are seeking an affordable, easily usable, and quickly deployable solution. 2. WooCommerce WooCommerce is popularly considered one of the most preferred alternatives for Shopify. It is quite convenient for website owners as it is a plugin for WordPress. Unlike other tools in the list, WooCommerce is designed to make WordPress sites work as functional eCommerce platforms. And in that particular aspect, it does a great job. However, if you are not already using an established WordPress site with high traffic, running WooCommerce can become quite expensive. On average, a website owner has to spend as much as $1000 in setting up a WooCommerce store with a moderate degree of customization. Even if you are not customizing a lot, running a WooCommerce store can cost you as much as $150 in a month. This would cover your hosting, themes, shipping plugins, security, and SEO. You will pay additional 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Ideal for: Someone who has a successful WordPress website and now wants to convert it into an eCommerce store. 3. Yo!Kart: Yo!Kart is a popular self-hosted multi-vendor platform for building online marketplaces. Unlike Shopify, it is a standalone platform that comes with a lifetime license and rich ecommerce features. The platform is fully customizable and scalable. Yo!Kart packages start from $999 and every package comes with a 1-year free technical support, free installation, and full source code. There are no monthly or yearly recurring fees. Considering it is a comprehensive platform, you may need some technical training to understand the system. Ideal for: Business owners who want to start ecommerce websites like Amazon or ebay where multiple sellers are selling under the same roof. 4. PrestaShop PrestaShop runs on the basic premise that creating an online eCommerce store should be an affordable exercise for any merchant. That is the reason why it is available for free and comes without any additional monthly fees. Its features include eCommerce functionalities like CRM & Email Marketing, Inventory Management, Multi-Store Management, and SEO Management. You can get a basic eCommerce store running by paying the registration fee for the domain and the hosting fee dues. While this may seem like a great alternative, given the fact that it is practically free, there is one major caveat – you cannot deploy or personalize your PrestaShop eCommerce store unless you know how to code. The entire platform has been designed, keeping in mind people who can code at professional levels of proficiency. The cost of hiring a developer who can add features to your store or modify the theme can be very costly. In addition to this, some basic features like promotions & reviews management, data security, and mobile access are not available on the platform. Ideal for: The merchants who have access to programming talent and don't mind a basic eCommerce store. 5. Wix Wix became popular as an online website builder. It also offers interesting eCommerce functionalities. For as low as $35 a year, you can have the Business Basic package that comes with a free year of using the domain, analytics reports, and 20 GB of storage. If you want greater control of your eCommerce platform but are not a professional programmer and are not interested in hiring one, Wix can be a great alternative. Its most expensive package costs about $80 a year. It comes with features like email marketing, SEO management, inventory management, data security, and promotions management. The challenge is – most of the charges marketed by Wix are very affordable for the first year in operations. After a year, many of these features, like the domain, will become payable elements. This way as soon as the first year of your operations is over, your cost of running the eCommerce platform will dramatically go up. Ideal for: Merchants who want to have greater control of their website's design without the need for coding skills and those who want the first year of operations to be largely affordable. Conclusion: Shopify can work for you if you are seeking a limited set of features. However, for lesser price-points, the alternatives for Shopify offer great functionalities. Quick eSelling is good for cost-effective and rapidly deployable eCommerce websites that come loaded with native features. WooCommerce is a viable option if you have a WordPress site and want to convert it into an eCommerce store. Yo!Kart specializes in building multi-vendor marketplaces. PrestaShop can be handy and very budget-friendly if you have access to coding talent. And Wix is good if you want greater control over what your store looks like, without getting into the programming aspects.