How do you handle payments?

[Dukenukem117]

I've been looking into payment services and was wondering what people's firsthand experience was with each. I keep reading horror stories of CC chargebacks and I want to know if thats just 'cost of doing business' or if anyone has found a better alternative.

For my personal design services, I use Zohobooks because you can send an invoice with a 'paypal business payment' option that charges a 50c flat fee (HUGE!). The money needs to come from either their bank account or paypal account. CC payments have the normal fee. In addition to the fee, I believe this also protects you from CC chargebacks. I dont recall if the seller of the money needs to have a PP business account or not. Freshbooks also use to have this but it got removed. Older accounts are grandfathered in I believe.

A lot of banks also offer Zelle (formerly ClearXchange) for quick bank to bank transfers. There are a lot of limits depending on the bank, so its not a complete solution.

As far as chargeback rules go, my bank tells me its up to the payment processor (square, stripe, paypal, etc) and not them. When jobs can easily cost thousands of dollars, that's a lot of money to lost or even be held up.

So does anyone have a policy of allowing CC up to a certain point, or what?

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I accept CC no matter what the amount. I have NEVER had a charge-back, nor am I worried about one. I pretty much know (mostly) who I'm doing business with and they always are 100% satisfied with what they got from me. If I get an e-mail order and it sounds fishy, I'll make sure to call the person on the phone to verify they are legit.

 

[Solventinkjet]

You will never be 100% charge back free over the long term. It's something you need to be able to weather. That being said, if you practice good credit card security policies, you can avoid a lot of problems. I get scam orders all the time and people who try to buy stuff with stolen credit cards. If you let one of those past your guard, you are on the hook no matter what service you use. Any payment processor telling you they are charge back free I would be very skeptical about them.

Edit just to clarify. I'm taking from an ecommerce perspective. For in person payment it's much less likely to get charged backs.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

We have been accepting cards for the last 10 years. We have not ever had a chargeback but we have had some troublesome clients over the years and have initiated a few refunds just to make them go away.

Accepting Credit in this day and age is pretty much a cost of doing business and its very limiting to not accept cards. That being said most of our large B2B transactions are checks or ACH.

 

[Dukenukem117]

We have been accepting cards for the last 10 years. We have not ever had a chargeback but we have had some troublesome clients over the years and have initiated a few refunds just to make them go away.

Accepting Credit in this day and age is pretty much a cost of doing business and its very limiting to not accept cards. That being said most of our large B2B transactions are checks or ACH.

What do you consider to be 'large'? And is that because they choose to use those payment options or because they are safer and its your decision?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Most of the time they choose to use that option for their accounting needs. By large I mean typically transactions over $10,000. We have some clients that will charge $50k+ but most use check or ACH.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Most of the time they choose to use that option for their accounting needs. By large I mean typically transactions over $10,000. We have some clients that will charge $50k+ but most use check or ACH.

That's what I was going to say... but really after 5k it becomes more rare that someone wants to pay via credit card. Orders over that amount are usually large companies that have a policy that they need to write a check

 

[particleman]

I primarily deal with online sales for the last 10+ years and obviously paypal and credit card are the norm. Charge backs are just part of doing business and as long as you have good documentation of what the person ordered and what you provided along with your policies in writing they generally aren't an issue. This means proofing policy, color policy, return policy, signature on something when an order is picked up or produced for example.

People can and will lie about literally anything to file a charge back though. Banks and CC companies allow charge backs for a variety of reasons including "item not received", "Item not as described", "Item damaged". The burden will be on you to prove you provided what they purchased. I recently had to fight a $1,500 charge back which was basically attempted fraud. After a long drawn out process I did get most of the money back.