As our clients know, we prefer payments for services at Answer Guy Central via electronic means. And we offer lower rates for our clients when they agree to follow a no-collections-or-billing-necessary business process we’ve set up through PayPal. It’s at least partially due to this that when PayPal discontinued their Money Market Fund a few weeks ago I pointed out that there are other choices for moving money around but that we’d probably be staying put.
Business process pays huge dividends, but because establishing and setting up a business process can be difficult, it can be painful to change one.
There has to be a payoff for business process change to make sense. When Square eliminated transaction fees, for example, the business change was huge—it was an actual business change—but unless you process a large number of transactions it probably wasn’t enough to lure you away from your existing credit card processor.
If you run an e-commerce site or have e-commerce built into your web site, the business process involved in collecting payments from your customers is more difficult; it typically hearkens back to a relic called a merchant account, and involves setting up a complex relationship with a bank as well as running some pretty complicated software.
Not any more.
While there have been several similar services around for a little while, we recently got a new entrant to the field of companies that will both act as your merchant (meaning you don’t need a merchant account of your own) and implement the guts of an e-commerce payment solution for you with pretty close to no effort on your part.
And the only question, business change and business process-wise, is why you would do the work of having a merchant account of your own when services like WePay are out there waiting to do the job for you?
As with the story about Square and the elimination of transaction fees, there’s still a bit of math to work through in deciding where your business change should point, but with merchant account proxies basically working for you for free (and I stress that their services are basically free—you pay merchant account proxies marginally more than you’d pay your bank, but the effort savings are large enough that it should pay off for most businesses), this is a no-brainer.
I’d go on, but there’s just no need; services like WePay just make sense.
All you need is the bandwidth to deal with them as you make your business process change. And of course, that’s why you Contact the Answer Guy.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks