A major engineering consulting services firm delivers engineering expertise to client business that touch millions of lives. With a varied customer base across the US and Canada, the company sought a way to keep prices fair despite the disparate costs associated with accepting different forms of payment, especially credit cards that come with high merchant fees. The company collaborated with InterPayments and Nova Module to build a compliant, customizable surcharging system while maintaining both its Stripe systems and NetSuite ERP.
Challenge
The company was seeing a growing amount of its transactions happening with credit card – a surprise that came with the added costs of higher merchant fees. The company was always seeking ways to better support their customer’s industry-leading engineering teams, and knew resource efficiency was critical to continued best-in-class delivery.
After extensive research, they determined that surcharging credit cards was a fair way to approach these new costs. This would keep the company from having to raise prices, and give their customers the option to avoid any new fees simply by changing their payment method.
The company wanted a customized surcharging system that gave them full control, so they could deliver it to the parts of their business as needed. This required a new system to be built, but Stripe was already its trusted payment processor, and NetSuite its trusted ERP. The company required a surcharging system that integrated seamlessly with these systems, avoiding needless disruption of its payment systems.
Solution
The company selected Palo Alto-based InterPayments as its surcharging solution provider. As a Managed Surcharge Provider, InterPayments provided a developer-friendly API interface into its fully compliant and flexible surcharging engine. InterPayments also delivered a holistic surcharging program, training all parts of the business that would be impacted by surcharging. To keep the company safe from risk, InterPayments backed their solution with indemnification against any compliance enforcement action.
To implement the integration of the InterPayments solution, the company selected Oakland-based Nova Module. A trusted Stripe and NetSuite partner, Nova Module was able to bring InterPayments-powered surcharging to the company’s NetSuite ERP and suite of Stripe products. Nova Module delivered this integration using PayPack, a no-code solution built to connect Stripe and NetSuite with a variety of powerful payment features, including recurring billing, customer payment links, and built-in surcharging powered by InterPayments.
Results
A Fully Customized Solution in Just a Few Weeks
Nova Module’s powerful, quick-to-implement PayPack solution and experience with Stripe and NetSuite systems, combined with the ease-of-use of the InterPayment system, allowed the companies to build a surcharging system that met every unique need in just eight weeks. The payment stack remained usable during this entire period.
InterPayments made good use of this development period to deploy their service model, delivering required 30-day notices to both the card networks and the customers of the engineering vendor. Training was also conducted, ensuring that the company’s team knew how to deploy surcharging to customers in a successful way.
Launch and Payback in the Same Quarter
The surcharging solution was launched in the middle of spring. In just five weeks, the company recouped their costs on deployment of the system through fee recovery alone.
This meant that further savings could immediately be returned to the organization.
Monthly Savings that Exceeded Estimates
With surcharging in place, the company saw 85%-95% of credit card fees recovered on every transaction. These recoveries came back in real time after every transaction, relieving margin pressure with immediate return.
But fee recovery only represented 25% of the $50K/month that was received in savings. The remainder came from transitions to different forms of payment, as well as process efficiencies provided by PayPack.
Because the surcharging system and PayPack are now in place, these returns are expected to continue in perpetuity. And the customizability of the InterPayments solution allows for changes in the future, should the company seek to change or grow the program in the future.
Customers Remain Satisfied, With Zero Churn
InterPayments understands that surcharging is more than just a fee, and needs more than just a feature – it’s a business transformation that requires a holistic program for successful acceptance. With this program in place, the company experienced minimal change in customer satisfaction. Clear messaging and targeted surcharging delivery resulted in a successful rollout of the surcharging program in the US and Canada.
To learn more about other ways that InterPayments and Nova Module can help you compliantly recover card processing fees across Stripe and NetSuite, contact us today.
To keep the subject of the article anonymous, identifying details have been changed.