Nowadays, it is crucial to work smarter, not harder, and any savvy business owner always has to be prepared for anything that might come their way. Whether your sales decrease or the website is experiencing technical issues, business owners always have to be at the top of their game brainstorming possible solutions.
However, one of the most critical and severe problems a high-risk owner has to be on the lookout for is the inability to access their payments, which happens if you don’t have a redundancy plan.
Redundancy is vital for high-risk merchant services. To sum up, redundancy means you will count on a backup processing account that is ready to go at all times if something happens to another one. Setting up this kind of account avoids losses that will inevitably occur if you find yourself without payment processing. By ensuring you have redundancy, you will always have a way for customers to pay for your business.
What Is Redundancy?
Before we begin, you need to understand the concept of a high-risk merchant account. To sum up, redundancy means you will count on a backup processing account that is ready to go at all times if something happens to another one. Setting up this kind of account avoids losses that will inevitably occur if you find yourself without payment processing. This is also why redundancy is vital for high-risk merchant services.
By high-risk, this refers to the fact that businesses that qualify as such tend to be more prone to chargebacks and have the necessity of paying higher fees for merchant services. If your business falls into this category, you might have probably heard about the importance of redundancy yet are still looking to find out a bit more. Well, search no longer, because below are listed the most important reasons about the role of redundancy for high-risk merchants:
- One processor isn’t enough
Many new and seasoned site owners still believe that having just one payment processor is plenty, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Starters must have an active billing cascade in place if you want to attract the most significant sales possible from your common forms.
If you pay attention to any of the biggest sales sites online, you will see that all of them make use of more than one processor. Whenever anyone takes action to either sign-up or purchase an item, the website smoothly redirects the customer to the first processor in their large array.
On the one hand, if the transaction manages to go through, whoever purchased the item received a confirmation via mail or text, and the website owner got their payment. However, suppose the sale fails by any chance instead of canceling the transaction altogether. In that case, the possible customer is instantly sent to another of the multiple processors available to complete the sale.
It is crucial for business owners to remember that failed payment attempts aren’t all that uncommon and can happen for many reasons. As an example, it is possible that one processor could be going through an Internet outage at the same time that the purchase is being made, therefore making it impossible for it to work correctly.
Moreover, it is also prevalent that one payment provider cannot accept a particular form of payment. Those payment methods can be by credit card or a more recent mobile system that another processor can accept and perform the transaction as it should.
In conclusion, multiple processors arranged in a cascade will ensure that you can earn money from the most significant possible number of sales. At the same time, in the eyes of your customers, it seems as if their sale is being made from just one attempt with just one single bank.
- Redundancy makes your business 100% foolproof
Redundancy in high-risk merchant services comes with the considerable advantage of allowing your business to always be online. Being able to process payments is arguably the essential job of the company, so you are pretty much done without being able to do so.
If you want to go the extra mile, make sure to make your backup merchant account work as fast as possible. What this means is that when you are setting up your account, you should verify how long it takes for it to be switched on if necessary.
Not only this, but you should also check that the account integrates with a payment gateway platform that you have either already used or have some knowledge about. This will make you feel a lot more comfortable with your backup and significantly reduce the amount of time it would take you to learn the ins and outs of the program.
So, by having a secondary high-risk merchant services account, your business will always have something to lay back on if anything were to go south.
- Redundancy is today’s solution for tomorrow’s problem
Challenges are bound to arise from time to time, especially in businesses. Because of this, you always need to have a Plan B prepared. Especially when things aren’t working as they actually should, this is why efficiently managing any changes in your high-risk merchant services account is the absolute best emergency plan you could have.
If by any means, your company account is shut down and you don’t already have redundant processing in place, you’ll be left panicking. Think about it: you would be completely missing out on income you would have otherwise obtained.
Not only this but you would probably also be forced to settle for a long-term contract or troublesome high fees only because of the desperate position you find yourself in. Unless you can find a new merchant account quickly, you are going to be left with no other choice other than completely shutting down the business.
Conclusion
After learning about all of the severe issues not having redundancy can cause, I’m sure you are already thinking about ways you can keep these nightmares at bay. The easiest and most beneficial way is to set up a redundant high-risk merchant services account! Once you are done, you will not only be able to sleep calmly at night, but you will be doing yourself a massive favor!
