About
The Challenge
The last few years has seen an acceleration in the migration to contactless card and mobile payments as consumers shift away from cash and paying by card becoming second nature for many consumers. This has invariably led to a significant increase in merchant service fees for retailers.
For an independently owned and operated retail liquor store, typical annual merchant service fees can be anywhere from $5,000 to a staggering $25,000, depending on store size and turnover. These costs have steadily increased in recent years and today in most instances represent a ‘Top 5’ annual cost of doing business, behind purchasing stock, wages, rent, electricity, or business insurance.
In addition to merchant service fees, customer support, transaction speed, reliability and reporting are also important factors a retail liquor business must consider when deciding on which merchant services provider best suits their business needs.
You may also have heard about “least-cost routing” or “merchant choice routing”, which is sending contactless dual-network debit card transactions (Visa/Mastercard, plus eftpos) to the lowest cost network, typically the eftpos network. But for most retailers, maximising the fee savings from enabling this feature can be difficult to achieve as the major banks typically only pass on 0-10% in fee savings from implementing this. Knowing what other banks or payment service providers to use and obtaining multiple merchant services pricing quotes for comparison can also be a time-consuming task.
The Partnership & Service:
For these reasons, Retail Drinks Australia (RDA) has partnered with Payments Consulting Network (PCN) to develop and launch this unique and bespoke Merchant Advisory pricing comparison service for RDA members.
PCN has been providing independent consulting and advisory services to the financial services sector since 2013. More recently, PCN started to support small, medium and large businesses, industry associations, and not-for-profit organisations, to optimise payments acceptance costs and improve service levels.
This service provides custom merchant services pricing negotiated exclusively for RDA members from multiple payment service providers, with a detailed fee savings analysis for the two most competitively priced providers, and least-cost routing is enabled as standard. In addition, all referral fees generated from successful applications are donated directly to select nominated charities by the payment service providers.
