Leading Building Materials Distributor recovered almost $400K in first 30 days with InterPayments
Background
Leading nationwide distributor of building materials with more than $2B in revenues and over 2,500 employees worldwide. Their VP of Finance and Accounting shares how InterPayments’ surcharging solution helped improve its net profit margins and remove its compliance risks.
Results in first 30 days:
•$370K in direct processing fees recovered
•50% increase in e-check and online bill pay volume (at significantly lower cost)
•$1,000 -$10,000 surcharged order value range
•Surcharging credit, SUA, P, Virtual cards
•Customized surcharging by product type
Challenge:
“Credit cards have a trade-off: timely, guaranteed payments are offset by high fees and costs of acceptance. The regulations are voluminous and deliberately confusing, and the rules vary by credit card brand. The escalating costs forced us to do something different. We wanted a technology solution to automate compliance and help us simply re-coup our costs.”
Their market expansion led to great growth but with the cost of higher card payments. The increase in usage of credit cards combined with rising credit card processing fees, especially for online payments, negatively impacted margins. This ultimately had an impact on its ability to offer all its customers the best prices and service. After 2 years of research, they concluded surcharging was the best route –but needed a flexible and compliant technology to limit disruption to its growing business.
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Solution Need
The VP of Finance had three priorities:
1) Implement an automated and scalable compliance solution;
2) Limit customer disruption
3) Maximize fee recovery
“We wanted a quick and straight forward method to surcharge at the time of payment to maximize our fee recovery.”
Solution Delivered
InterPayments’ surcharge service met all 3 requirements.
Many medium and large merchants benefit from lower processing rates on interchange plus pricing. With InterPayments, they kept their low processing rates with their existing payment providers while surcharging every card by its unique, exact fee in real-time when the customer offered its payment method.
“We spent 2 years researching the complex world of surcharging compliance rules. We wanted a strategic partner who is able to confidently support compliance for us –now and in the future as rules change.”
They carefully understood the 67 jurisdictions governing U.S. surcharging. State, federal, and card brand regulations that constantly change made it difficult to do on its own. InterPayments’ technology instantaneously automates all the rules at the point of payment so they could sleep well at night.
“Almost all our orders are paid virtually –online and over the phone. We needed to keep our existing payment providers in place and customize surcharging for the best customer experience.”
First, they saved time and money by keeping their payment infrastructure in place and simply installing InterPayments’ API into their online payment journey. Second, customers were given a choice of payment that avoided the surcharge. Third, InterPayments’ technology allowed them to tailor surcharging to suit their business; for example, they chose not to surcharge lower value orders using InterPayments. In the future, as their payment channels and locations grow, InterPayments can easily grow with them.
Quote:
“We entrust InterPayments for its surcharging service, but we got much more. We sleep well at night knowing InterPayments keeps us compliant with complex surcharging regulations. Their data helps us better understand our transaction level payments costs.”
VP Finance and Accounting, Leading BuildingMaterials Distributor