How a Recurring Billing Merchant Account Can Help Boost Your Small Enterprise

Recurring payments are an option that allows customers to make payments automatically at regular intervals. More precisely, it's paying a specific amount on a periodic basis for an ongoing product or service. They can be used in a variety of situations, from monthly subscriptions and leasing arrangements to paying electricity and telephone bills.

Recurring billing is frequently associated with debit orders or direct debits.  However, credit and debit card recurring billing provides the same monthly collection along with other amenities such as real-time approvals faster funding and global sales reach.

Recurring billing solutions are a great way to increase customer retention, improve checkout experience and grow customer loyalty. At the same time they automate payment processing and reduce operating costs to make your business more cost effective. For smaller business looking to grow, recurring payments provides a platform for expanding their reach and bringing in more customers.

Some of the benefits of opening a recurring billing merchant account include:-

• It meets the demand for payment card options
• Improves  cash flow and business forecasting
• Reduces default and improves collections
• It builds customer loyalty, retention and improves customer service
• Offers flexible payment schedules of weekly, monthly or annually

While operating the recurring billing merchant account, the following steps need to be kept in mind-

Select a Recurring Billing Solution

An application or interface is needed to manage clients and recurring card billing. Payment Gateways offer an online interface that allows merchants to manage their recurring clients. You can also use a software package where you will need to make sure that it works with a payment gateway as the card transaction still needs to be processed to the bank.

Introduce the Recurring Payment Option to Your Customers

Customers will understand what a recurring payment is so you won’t have to explain to them how it works but you will want to inform them that the payment will be recurring and to notify them of the set timing, frequency and amount.

Set Timing, Frequency And Amount

In order to set up a recurring payment, you will need to include schedule start date, billing frequency, scheduled end date, first payment amount and subsequent payment amounts.

Process Payment Information

In order to process a recurring payment, card information is required to be captured.  Payment Gateway’s offer tokenization solutions that allow the card information to be replaced with a token so that for subsequent transactions only the token and value are required to be submitted.

All over the globe, businesses are becoming aware of the benefits associated with having a recurring billing merchant account. Consumers prefer to have recurring credit card billing as a payment option and many businesses have either implemented or begun the process to implement recurring payments. Some of the business that have benefited extremely from recurring payments are those in the fields of membership and subscriptions, insurance services, digital services and telecommunications, internet service providers (ISPs) and digital gamers, real Estate and utility companies, educational and municipal institutions, medical and health service providers amongst many others.