Payment Acceptance Policies, Strategies & Best Practices

In addition to popular consumer oriented products like debit cards and rewards cards, today’s buyers are using several types of commercial card products including business, corporate, fleet, purchasing and GSA purchasing cards. Establishing payment acceptance best practices helps manage different payment choices for competitive advantage.

Work with a VantageB2B Payment Analyst to develop a payment acceptance roadmap to lower costs, increased security and greater efficiency.

Contact us to discuss setting payment acceptance policies including:

• When to extend trade credit vs. accept card payments.  Businesses are finding that not every customer or every invoice is best suited for issuing trade credit. Accepting commercial credit cards are an important component of a company’s payment policies.
• How to qualify for Level 3 Interchange on commercial and GSA card payments.  The reality is that most businesses accepting commercial cards from their buyers are NOT qualifying for the BEST available rates because their merchant account is not set up or registered properly.
• How to steer clients to eChecks & ACH to lower costs- effectively reducing your overall payment processing expenses.

Follow these commercial and purchasing card payment best practices:

1. Authorize and settle at the time of order (provided you have quick fulfillment). In all cases, the best practice for card acceptance is to authorize and settle the card at or very near the time of shipment/delivery.  Authorization amount must equal settlement amount. 
2. Authorize at the time of order and settle later at time of shipment. Caution here, you can not qualify for Level III Interchange if you use Authorization Only and Force/Offline functionality. Using this payment policy will downgrade your transactions to Electronic/Standard pricing and prevent Level 3 Interchange rate qualification.
   • One work around would be to NOT get a pre-auth. Instead simply capture the card and customer data using a store and forward function then charge the card at the time of the fulfillment. Using the “Store & Forward” functionality will store the transaction information without running an authorization. By selecting “Store & Forward” as the transaction type, you can either enter a date for the transaction to process in the future, or leave the future date blank and capture the transaction for processing at a later time. You will be able to add Level III Data after the transaction is submitted for authorization, but prior to settlement.
3. Authorize and settle at some later time (ex. same timing as a check payment). Avoid extending 30 day trade credit terms only to pay the Interchange fees to accept a card payment. When taking card payments, take them in place of extending terms.

More Payment Policy Resources:

• Merchant Card Acceptance - 10 Important Lessons
  Protect yourself from customer-initiated chargebacks and fraud!
• Protect your business with card acceptance Best Practices
  Study and implement this best practices checklist.
• AVS and CV Codes
  Merchants should use the AVS and CVV2 card features as part of a best practices policy to mitigate fraud.
• About Chargebacks
  Study this important overview for the knowledge you need to protect your business from the risk of loss from credit card fraud and abuse.
• The Essential Merchant Guide to Card Payment Refunds
  Read and follow these best practices.

Contact us to schedule a complimentary consultation