A large manufacturer of construction surfaces was growing rapidly, driving annual revenues of well over $1 billion. But with construction material margins shrinking every year, protecting margins in this growing revenue became a paramount concern.
The company wanted to control every possible cost, including one that had come to take on an outsized portion of revenue: credit card fees. Surcharging, the act of passing on those fees to customers only when credit card are used, seemed like the right approach. But the company needed a solution that worked with their unique payment technology stack. It needed to be low risk and quick to deploy. Finally, the company was concerned about the customer impact because it would be an early surcharge adopter in its industry.
For all these reasons, the company needed more than just a fee added to a transaction. It needed a program to manage the business transformation that comes with surcharging. After extensive research, the company decided that InterPayments was best positioned to help them meet these challenges. Through the partnership with InterPayments, the merchant was able to recover more than 90% of its credit card fees every year – a savings nearly $850,000 annually.
Surcharge Program Overview
Industry: Construction Materials Manufacturing
Size: $1.5+ billion annual revenue
Location: Global, with surcharging focused on the United States and Canada
ERP/Accounting Software: Infor ERP for Manufacturing
Who to Surcharge: All card-not-present transactions
Time to Implement: 1 month
Considerations: Deployment speed, refunds, sales tax
About the Company
A large manufacturer of construction materials, including surfaces, adhesives, and more, the company has a strong focus on dependability. That focus extends to the durability of its products, a service-oriented customer approach, on-time delivery, and more, and has driven the company’s customer-first success across decades of business.
Solving Challenges
The company was doing well and wanted to be proactive with costs, without wasting any time. With more than $30 million of annual revenue coming in on credit cards, they were seeing nearly $1 million slip away every year to credit card fees, a meaningful amount that could be invested back into the business. And with input costs rising, the company couldn’t wait until margins collapsed. They needed to act immediately.
That company was able to thoroughly consider what it wanted to accomplish beyond margin recovery. InterPayments addressed each problem to create a comprehensive surcharge program that created the best client experience:
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Challenge |
Solution |
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Full Compatibility – The company had a mature payments solution tied to an industry-specific ERP built by Infor. The solution had to work without disrupting this system. |
Interpayments provided agnostic, independent surcharging technology that can integrate anywhere. InterPayments deployed PayLink, an advanced virtual terminal and payment solution with surcharging pre-integrated, and which connected easily to the existing technology stack. |
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Low Risk, High Speed – The company needed the safety that comes with full compliance with rules and regulations around surcharging. But it also didn’t want to spend unnecessary time building out new resources to implement such a solution. The company knew it needed a Managed Surcharge Provider. |
InterPayments Certification ensured that the company was continuously compliant, even in the current environment of frequently changing state regulations. However, it also accelerated deployment by implementing PayLink, a prebuilt, out-of-the-box solution that can be enabled in just 30 days. While not appropriate for every merchant – different payment technologies have different requirements, and ensuring the right solution is always the most important consideration – it did work to great effect for the company, allowing for keeping the same payment providers and terms with no changes. |
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Customer Concerns—While the company wasn’t the first B2B construction manufacturer to implement surcharging, there were still concerns. Would customers look elsewhere? The company wanted to be confident before making the leap. |
InterPayments understands if you treat surcharging as just a fee, customers are more likely to reject it. However, InterPayments has never lost a merchant due to customer churn, as it treats surcharging as a business transformation. A plan was put in place to communicate the upcoming surcharge program early and often, explaining that it prevents across-the-board price increases and can always be avoided by changing payment methods. Customer satisfaction levels were maintained before, during, and after surcharging was implemented. |
Results
Successes at a Glance
Fees Before Surcharging: $975,000
Surcharge Recovery: $825,0000
Customer Migration from Credit Card: <5%
Savings from Customer Migration: $25,000
Total Savings: $850,000, or 87% of fees
Customer Attrition: 0%
After partnering with InterPayments, the company was able to eliminate nearly all costs related to credit card fees.
These days, the company recovers about $825,000 in surcharges, the vast majority of its fees. A few customers did migrate to less expensive forms of payment, but very few – which is unusual, as surcharging normally migrates 25% of payers to non-surcharged forms of payment like ACH. So while the impact of migration didn’t have a huge impact on savings, it did add up – to savings of $850,000, or 87% of total fees.
With such a high conversion rate, the program paid for itself rapidly – in less than 3 weeks. After that, surcharging provided continuous returns, with no customer attrition. Because InterPayments understands that surcharging is more than just a fee, it provided a robust customer communication program that prevent any unwanted surprises, helping to ensure the success of the program.
The company was able to take advantage of being an early mover towards surcharging with the right surcharge program. With a rapid deployment thanks to InterPayments’ out-of-the-box PayLink virtual terminal, the company was able to quickly apply surcharging best practices provided by InterPayments and start recovering nearly all of its fees very quickly after making the decision to surcharge.
Interested in seeing how InterPayments can help your company? Contact us today.
To keep the topic of the article anonymous, identifying details have been changed.