Online software services have been on the rise since the advent of the internet. Online services built specifically for businesses have been growing significantly since 2010. In 2020, the global pandemic, unfortunately, forced many businesses to cut in-person or physical contact. This required businesses to adapt. It created new opportunities for online businesses to emerge.
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and online software businesses have been created for many types of services and many industries. This article focuses on B2B (Business-to-Business) software that enables customers to take payments.
Types of Software Businesses That Need Payments
B2B software companies are evolving quickly. Payments, as part of the software business, were once decoupled because payment systems were complex and not easy to integrate with. This made the payments process complex and error-prone.
Today, software platforms and payment systems have evolved to allow seamless integration. This brings a new level of user experience for the business software. It also allows for better customer support resulting in stronger retention of customers.
Business software that allows their customers to take payments now have the opportunity to have deeper integration into payment systems. Customer management systems are prime examples of types of software systems that can integrate payments. If you provide software that helps businesses manage their customers, payments can easily be incorporated.
Payment Integration Options for Software Platforms
There are multiple ways to integrate payment processing into your software. Integration supports both software and hardware. For example, if a business sells a CRM software that supports in-person payments, direct integration with payment terminal hardware is available.
On the software side, a full set of payment APIs allows functionality to create customer profiles, initiate single or recurring payments, add or modify saved credit cards, send email receipts, and all the other core functions necessary to create a complete payment experience.
Open APIs give complete control to the software vendor to create amazing experiences at the same time as ensuring that all credit card and PCI-related data is securely managed. A core reason to work with TCM is that we take care of all the PCI and security concerns. At no point will the software need to handle credit card data. TCM manages all data related to credit cards.
More Payment Options Generally Means Faster Growth
Giving your customers more payment options removes most of the obstacles or objections that cause your business to lose a sale. It has been found that increasing payment options can increase revenue for a business by 30%. Increasing payment options comes in two ways: payment forms and card types.
Payment forms mean ways that people pay: web or mobile, in-person, recurring, tap-to-pay (phones, Apple Watch, etc) over the phone, in a mobile app, and others. The APIs offered cover all the capabilities to cover the payment forms.
Card types are generally credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, etc) and debit cards (Interac, etc). These are the most popular card types for most software businesses. It’s important to include other less popular, but potentially growing forms. This could include cryptocurrency, Paypal, and bank transfers.
Software Businesses can Build a Payment Revenue Stream
It’s now easy for SaaS and software businesses to generate revenue from payment processing. Each end customer can be quickly set up with their own merchant account so processing runs through the software business seamlessly.
Rather than needing to build out its own payments team, TCM can handle all the operations, applications, underwriting, setup, and customer support. It’s possible to bring those operations in-house when desired. We’re here to help you set up a payments business within your business. This creates an optimal scenario for software businesses to build a payments revenue stream.
Each month, the software business can take a percentage of the payment processing revenue which can grow into a large and profitable new revenue stream.
