#291 - Battle Of The Payment Processors

I do think that making sure your Portal has Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay options, I think that's huge because I know a lot of my customers get paid that way.

Yeah, it's it. Every day it's getting more and more.

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Payment processing. Processing your cards when you're a buy here, pay here dealership. It's your lifeblood.

This is a. This is really exciting stuff, Jeff.

Yeah, so what we're doing this week, guys, we're going to call it the Back of the Vendors. This is an idea I've been trying to get into place for years and years. I kind of like a consumer report style. Hey, I did the research, I talked to a bunch of different vendors and I'm going to give you some unbiased opinions or information on those vendors so that you don't have to go out there and do it yourself. Right. Because all the time in the dealer groups they're always saying, who's the best payment processor? Who's the best dms? What GPS should I use? What are the pros and cons of, you know, this service software? So we could go out there and each one of us go out and try to do it ourselves or, yeah, I'll do it for you.

You know what's funny is Jeff says if you don't do this right, for one, you won't collect your payments very well, and two, you may spend money that you don't need to. A couple years ago, I found that we were spending almost as much in payment processing fees as we were on advertising. And payment processing fees really don't make you any money.

Right.

And so, so I went down this rabbit hole of charging fees and stuff like that several years ago. But when it all goes back to payment processing, I stayed with the same company for years because that's what I was introduced to. So this is so vital to a buyer Pay here dealership. You really need to pay attention if you're buy your pay here dealership. And you need to get it right because if you don't, it could cost you serious money.

Yeah. So let's talk about this, guys. Now, obviously I couldn't go out and talk to every single payment processor. So a. The first caveat and, and, and you know, disclaimer on this is I only spoke with repay pay near me and blitz pay. And the reason I chose those three is because they are large and active in the association.

I. I think those are the three. If you were. If you were honest with yourself, those are the three big players in the industry, Jeff. And I think you picked the right ones. They all do. They all do a good job. And they. Any of them could work for your dealership. It just depends on who you feel most. Most comfortable going with. Right?

Yeah. And that's what we're going to talk about. So the other disclaimer and caveat to this whole thing is it's not perfect. Right. This was my conversation with a couple of different salesmen, and I asked the questions that I thought was important. I may have gotten it a little bit wrong. So, A, if you're one of these vendors, don't come yelling and screaming at me. I'm sorry.

B, it's something like call Jeff at first season.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No lawsuits, no defamation claims, whatever it is. Okay, so. So that's where we're going to start at first off, Luke, my first point, and I want you guys to listen to this. You need to look at your current payment processor's contract. Guaranteed you are under contract with your current payment processor. They got you.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny about that, Jeff. When I was out at your place in February, I was going through a change, right, to switch to another processor. And you, you look at me, you're like, well, I'm sure you're still under contract. And I look at you like you had, you know, carrots growing out of your head. I said, what are you talking about, a contract? You know, and. And we did the research and actually our contract date to get out ended that day. We were able to send the email that day and nail it down. If you would not have said that, I would have been locked in for another renew for 12 or 36 months, whatever it was going to be.

And that's exactly what happened to me with my current payment processor. When I started this a couple years ago, looking at this, I sent off an email and looked, and I had missed my expiration date or my renewal notice day by like a month, maybe 10 days. Right. So it automatically renewed for another 36 months. Insane, right? Insane that these payment processors have these long contracts. I'm just going to say that straight up. It's ridiculous. I don't know that you can fight it. I don't know that they would fight you. There's all sorts of things they can put in there. I know my contract says that if my. If my processing dollar amounts drops by A certain amount, they can collect the fees regardless. Right. Like that's kind of the catch. You can't just turn this one off and turn this one on. Even though you never canceled the contract from the first one, they're going to see that your volumes dropped off and they may come after you. I don't know. It's obviously not a good PR thing for them to do, but you don't know.

Well, you know, dealers, yeah, dealers get mad about these contracts with these vendors all the time. And you know, kind of. I get it. I don't get it. We get mad when people break contracts with us. Right. And, and we get mad when we can't break a contract with someone else. So I think what Jeff is pointing out here, know your contract renewal dates on every vendor you have and have a, you know, build a spreadsheet that shows that. I think that will help you out in the long run.

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's obviously two different situations. If I'm paying an upfront front fee to migrate my data, there should be no contract. Right. Because you're no money into it. Now if you're asking me to sign a long term contract because you're putting a lot of footwork into the upfront, then that makes sense. As far as a payment processor goes, I don't know that they do anything but enter some forms and flip a switch. And now I got to do all the work to move my customers over.

So you're right.

We're going to talk about that migration in a second. But first off, what I want to talk about is the biggest thing that everyone wants to know. What are my fees and what is my contract? When you're looking at this new payment processor, and if you engage any of these three, repay pay near me or Blitzpay, that is a good, good starting point to talk about. And there's going to be a couple things they want to look at. Processing fees are negotiable. Like it's a range. They have a range of processing fees. And there's a couple factors that go into that. The amount of volume that you're processing. Right. The other factor that we don't think about that goes into that is are you going to allow that merchant to charge your customer a processing fee? Right, Luke, that's what you did.

Yeah, that's what I did. And you know, honestly I didn't know how negotiable these companies were. What I found out is essentially, and I've used two of these, these folks, and you can Cover that whole fee, let's say 99% of that fee or 98% of that fee with the convenience fee that these companies can set up for you. So don't let that be the end all, be all their convenience fee or not their convenience fee. But they're, they're processing their.

Yeah, so that's the way that this works, guys. The processing fees are going to run about 1.5% up to around 3% max. Right. Of your total dollar processed for the month. Right. So I process about 200,000amonth in credit card payments. Right. And I'm somewhere around a 2% fee. So I'm paying somewhere between 4 and $5,000 a month in credit card processing fees. Right now what happens is that merchant knows that they're going to collect that $5,000. What they do is they can slide some of that 5,000 over to a convenience fee against the customer. That would then offset the processing fees. That convenience fee though, the catch is it can only be charged on someone making a one time payment. Right. It's not charged on people that are on recurring. So what these vendors are going to do is look at your credit card processing and say, okay, Jeff, you process 200,000 last normally every month. Here's the deal. Half of your payments are one time payments. So we could charge a four or five dollars processing fee on those and recoup quite a bit of our money that we need to get as a merchant, as a, as a processor. So we can give you a lower rate on the other side. Right. So those two numbers play into the fact where the processor still getting their nut and you can actually get a slightly lower processing fee.

Yeah. And it's super important to keep this in mind. And it's, it's essential to do because it's going to cut your, it's going to cut your cost dramatically. Jeff, we saved about $6,000 a month by moving to this model. So it is a very important model. And if you are choosing one of these, I think they all have the ability to do this. Right, Jeff?

Yeah. From what I understand and, and I don't know that it's state specific as it is a federal law. This is not you charging a credit card fee. Right. You, you right. I think in most or all states you cannot charge a fee to run credit card. I know there's a ton of companies, you know, industries that get away with it. The merchant is charging the fee. That's not your fee. That fee goes to repay, it goes to blitz pay, it goes to pay near me. It's their fee, they collect it regardless. So if you have all of a sudden everybody goes to a one time payment, they could in theory collect a ton of fees. They could make $20,000 that month and still charge you your 1.5% processing or your 2% processing on all the dollars amount that were run. Right. Those are two separate buckets. You need to understand your processing fee that they charge the customer does not offset your percentage that you are going to pay regardless. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And all it does is it gives you the ability to negotiate a lower fee. Right.

And keep this in mind. Well, it does kind of offset that, but we won't go down that rabbit hole. Keep this in mind. Our customers and most customers, if I go online today and, and pay my taxes with the state, I'm going to pay a convenience fee. So everybody is used to paying convenience fees. So don't, don't let that block your, your site on these. It's charged by the credit card company, by the, the phone company is charged by the electric company. All these people charge it. So use it. This is something that can really help save you a lot of money in the long run.

Yeah. Okay, so you talk about that. We talk about contract length now from my research, repay typically a three year contract. That's what I was in before. That's what they proposed to me. This time Pay near me has proposed somewhere between a three and a five year contract and Blitzpay has proposed a two year contract. So those are the numbers I got out of them. I guess that's their standard offer. I don't know that those are negotiable. I would, I would argue that they should be and that you should be able to say, hey, you know, I only want to test you out for 12 months. I'll sign a 12 month contract and then we'll see how this goes. Because what I don't want to do is sign a 36 month contract with you and then find out that I hate your integration or I hate your platform or you know, your server is constantly going down.

I think, I think they are negotiable but I think if they, if you negotiate them then you may pay a little bit higher fee. So make sure you know that. And Jeff, when you went through the fees earlier, we talked about that, but some of these companies have built in software as well. Did you want to discuss that at all?

Yeah. So we'll get to that real quick though. Great time to pause and just mention our guys over at Buckeye with all these payment processing and these fees, this is the way to get that CPI money. Right. We've talked about previous episodes. When we talk about the integrations with your dms, you want to be sure that they're picking up not only the contract term, Right. When these things push between each other. We'll talk about that integration in a minute. But they've got to be able to pick up that CPI money as well, because. Right. We're using Buckeye. We're funding our CPI program. Right, Luke? Yeah.

I mean, all these things are super important. But back to Buckeye, and we're getting close to the fourth quarter, Jeff. And. And some of y' all made a lot of money this year, and there's no better way to help save in taxes legally. And setting up a reinsurance company. Call the guys right now, and I promise you they'll have you up and going probably before the end of November, middle of November. And if you do that, you can set up all these little things to. To take your bottom line away a little bit this year, save you some money on these taxes that you are going to have to pay.

Mm. So let's talk about that payment platform. So from a dealer standpoint, right? So when we talk about integration, first off, integration with. Or I should say migration first. Right. Because you're migrating your data over. Very, very hard to do, guys. It is not likely at all that you're going to be able to keep any of your existing auto pays. Right. They're completely separate situations. The data is encoded. These guys don't talk to each other. They don't play well. You could probably try to get that info over from your previous processor. But just understand, you are going to be setting up all of your auto pays, all of your stored payments from scratch, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. You're going to zero on auto pays. Just to let everybody know that you're. If you've got 90% penetration on auto pay right now, when you do this migration, it's going to be zero. Be prepared now. Now, hopefully a lot of y' all have signed, you know, signed affidavits or documents from your customers where you can just add them back in. But it's still a lot of man hours. So don't think. Don't think that all your autopsies are going to pay on Friday morning once you do this, because they are not going to.

Yeah, that's the scariest thing for me, that's the reason I've held off, is I keep waiting for that time where I Say, okay, delinquency is really low. I can afford this hiccup, this big hurdle, this obstacle that I'm going to throw in front of all my customers that I know is going to cause delinquency to spike. Is there ever a good time to do this? Not to mention, I'm also, I'm going to be instituting a payment fee, a convenience fee that my customers aren't used to. So maybe this is a good time to talk about that. When do you, when do you spring this on your customers and your employees? What?

You know, we did this. We started the fee. I'm gonna tell two stories. We started the fee March 1st of 2020. Guess what was happening in the world that's.

See that Great.

It was the perfect timing. But we educate our customers for two months prior to it. And that really did a lot. So if you're moving to a convenience fee, you need to educate your customers. You have it on your website, need to send an email. You need to do all these things to let your customers know, hey, we are going to be moving to a convenience fee. These are the ways not to pay the convenience fees. And if you do that and if you have word tracks that your collectors can tell the customer when they do it. We actually put it on the bottom of the receipts when we were mailing them out or emailing them out. We did about 10 different things to really educate the customer on how the convenient fees were going to affect them and also how they could get around it. And it really made the transition easy. Now also COVID lockdowns happened as well, which really made it easy for us. Anyway, there is not a good time to do it, but the best time to do it is right now after you educate your customers.

Yeah, I think that's my thing is educate them and maybe like you know, January 1st, like I like that idea. Or maybe like mid tax time where I know they're going to have the money anyways and delinquencies are going to drop hopefully in that time anyway. So it kind of eases that stress. So I want to talk about that, that customer facing platform, but let's first talk about the dealership facing platform. And so Luke, when you talked about fees. So of these three providers, BlitzPay is the only one that charges you a monthly software fee. And I think that's 299. And that's because they give you an actual collections interface. Right. It's a standalone collections interface that integrates into their payment and supposedly integrates fairly tightly with all the major DMSs. So that's the difference is you're getting an actual new payment platform which is better. Is. Is then your DMS is worse. I don't know.

They advertise it as a collections tool. Jeff, I've sat through the. I've sat through this before and watch it and it, it talks back and forth to your. To your DMS if you're using certain DMS in real time. And it's really a collector tool and that is the reason they're charging you that software fee. Would it take some getting used to from your collectors? I think so, but I think it's really helpful to your collectors as well. So you're paying a little bit more all in with Blitzpay I think. But I think it may give you advantages.

Yeah. And so along those lines, a lot. Let's talk about the features that they're going to give you on the customer side of the. Of the portal. Right. So. Or sorry, sorry. On the vendor side of the portal, on the employee side. Right. So all of these systems have auto text. Right. Like auto text reminders. You set them up however you want to based on cues. Day late, day before payments due. Now Blitzpay includes unlimited texting in that 299. So that's one advantage there is you're going to be able to send out all those blast texts or text reminders. It's. And then that'll link over to their customer facing portal, which we'll talk about in a minute. You're gonna pay. Pay near me is gonna charge you like a bulk rate for your texts. I think that's kind of an above and beyond charge. And then repay is the same situation. From what I understand. They're gonna charge you 10 cents a text and obviously you've got the auto. The opt in situation. I think with all of those. I know that some of those provide. Well, I think they all provide separate phone numbers. So now you're going to have a new phone number which I believe is a local area code to you, which is an advantage because if it ever gets flagged, you don't want to be sending these from your dealership's phone number because you don't want to get blacklisted by one of these carriers. So that's an advantage on the collector side of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were.

So they weren't. And Blitzpay has everything built into it. Correct. Like because it's a collections tool. Your collector is working out of the Blitzpay port platform. They're not really going into your DMS much. And using the collections module there inside your dms, from what I understand, you're setting up all your promise to pays, you're setting up all of your, you know, partial pays and your CPIs and things like that through their platform. And then that platform updates, I think, some or most of that information into your dms, but not all of it.

Not all of it. We, I will, I will say that people that use this platform use the collection module there and the one inside of their DMS as well, because I think it speaks very well to, to your dms, but not perfectly is what.

You'Re talking about the Blitzpay Collection collections platform.

Yes.

So speaking of integrations, I. Each of them have a level of integration and that's one thing you need to wrap your brain around when you're thinking about, okay, what data is being passed between my payment processor and my DMS and where is that data originating from? Right. Sometimes you originate the data inside your dms, all your payments are stored in there, their credit cards are stored in your dms and then it just kicks it out to the payment processor, runs their card and then kicks it back into your dms. Whereas other ones, all the data sits inside of the payment processors platform. And then once that credit card is captured, it kicks over a little payment note into the DMS and records the customer is current. And that happens every, you know, 30 seconds or so. Right. Because they're pinging your DMS every 30 seconds and updating the information. Whereas other ones sit have a very, very tight API integration into your dms and it's instant.

Yeah. This is a separator among payment processors, Jeff. And you really need to understand this as a consumer, how it's going to talk to your, how they, they are going to communicate together. And if you don't get this right, you're going to create a nightmare for your collectors and for yourself. So pay close attention to what they tell you and how they show you it works with your dms. Because this, this is a nightmare if not done properly.

Yeah, it's a, it's a huge. The integration between the two is the real catch. Right. It's like the real hook. I know that, you know, I use idms. Dealer Socket Repay is the only company that has an API integration. Right. So it is instantaneous. And all the credit card and all the information is basically stored inside of, or what looks like it's stored inside of IDMs. BlitzPay and repay have just a. I Don't know what you call that integration. It's a loose integration that updates, you know, every 30 seconds or something.

Well, I will tell you that if you, if you charge convenience fees, that integration that Repay currently has is not feasible and does not work. So you got to make sure that you go down every rabbit hole. I know there's a lot of rabbit holes to go down with all this stuff, but the direct integration does not work when you're using the convenience fee with repay.

Yeah. And so let me talk just a little bit more in depth. I don't want to go down this integration hole too far, but the major. All three of these processors Repay, Painter, me, and Blitzpay, they all have a. A pretty decent integration with dealer socket idms, ams, Automaster systems. Right. So if you're on that deal pack, for the most part, I don't think Blitzpay has a very good deal pack. Frazier is about a 50, 50 hit and miss. The ones you're not going to get any integration with are Wayne Reeves. So sorry, guys, if you're on Wayne Reeves, you're getting no integration with any of these. Dealer center is really, I think, a no go on most of these. And then a lot of the reason why is a lot of those DMS is, are trying to push their own payment platform. They have built in payment processing, which is part of the way they keep their fees super low. So they're not looking to integrate with anybody.

Yeah.

So very important that you look into that. So, Luke, before we transition into the customer side of it, which is really, really crucial, let's talk about the upcoming conventions that we got going on to make sure everybody knows about the. The two times they can come out and chitchat.

Yeah. So first of all, coming up in October, I think around the 13th or so, is Lease Here, Pay here Summit. Hey, this is not just for Lease here, Pay here dealers. It's for buy here, Pay here dealers, Lease here, Pay here dealers and those that are interested in both. It's in San Diego, beautiful time of the year. And I, I believe you'll get a lot out of it. We're doing some cool interviews. A lot of knowledge around there. I'm man, I'm interviewing a guy, Jeff, that has $75 million on the books.

Whoa.

So there's going to be some really cool things talked about and you need to get out to San Diego. Lease Here, Pay here Summit coming up.

Yeah. And the other one is the Buy here, Pay here dealer forum put on by the association. This is the fall convention specifically geared towards buy here pay here dealers. That's going to be November 13th and 15th, 13th through the 15th. It's in beautiful Indianapolis, the middle of nowhere, but at the JW Marriott. So doesn't really matter, you guys never leave the hotel anyway. So this could be held in freaking Kansas City or something. So it's a beautiful hotel and they're working on the education track. So hopefully we get the agenda out soon. And you know, it was supposed to.

Be, it's supposed to be out this week is what I was told. So look for it any day.

Fingers crossed. Okay, so let's discuss real quick the customer side of things. So having a customer facing portal or a payment option is essential. I think it's essential. I think it's crucial. Man, I'll tell you what the one thing I hate the most is on a Friday morning my receptionist and my collector are just picking up the phone and saying, okay, yeah, what card do you want that run on? Okay, what card do you want that run on? Oh, okay. What's the new card number? Like all they're just, they're just punching in card numbers and punching payments through people that could do it their darn selves.

It's a waste of time. 100% a waste of time. It takes away from collecting the people who actually need to be collected. So if you get this right, this makes life so much easier for everybody in your office.

Not to mention like these people are. I mean I know I call in my credit card all over the place, but really, like, come on, we shouldn't be taking credit cards over the phone. We shouldn't be writing them down on a piece of paper. Not to mention like we don't know whose name is actually on that card. Right. They say it's their card with their name on it.

But like, do you really know?

Geez, talk about a chargeback nightmare. Speaking of, I got a story for you on that later. So having a customer facing side. So let's talk about that. So the customer portal, REE Pay has a web based portal. It's their, the same one they've had for forever. They are claiming that they're coming out with a new user interface by the end of the year. But I think they've been saying that for a minute, so I probably wouldn't hold your breath on that part of it. Pay near me has a really cool one. It's a web portal, but it's basically like cookie based. So once that customer's phone is authorized, they can access it just through, like a single click. Like you send them a text reminder. They click on the pay now and it, boom, kicks them right over to their payment portal where they have all their stored methods. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. BlitzPay has a mobile friendly as well. You opt in. So pretty close to the same thing, I think.

Yeah. I think both of them are, what would say, quasi apps. They're not real apps, but they're really close to it and they work well.

Yeah. Okay, so now let's talk about the channels of payment. Right? So we have channels and we have forms. So channels of payment are like, how is that customer making their payment? Right. You've got. They could call and give me a credit card number. Don't like that. Ivr, which is the phone call one where they call in and enter their card number. Me. That's a thing of the past.

Nobody.

Nobody does freaking IVR anymore. And then there's where the customer instigates. Right. So you have a customer portal where they're doing it or they have a text to pay. Right.

And the text to pay is really slick. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah. And I think that's blitz pay is mostly a text to pay, Right?

Yeah, I guess. I don't know if the other companies have it either, but it's awesome.

I think that's a. Hey, your payment's due for 200 click. Yes. To authorize this payment. Something like that. The other thing we need to talk about is the forms of payment. Right? So now all three of these companies, they all accept, right? The regular debit, credit, MasterCard, you know, Visa, American Express, all those types of things. A couple of them do a little bit different. So Ree Pay does have the option for Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, and PayPal. So a lot of gig workers are trying to use their venmo or their PayPal accounts. Obviously, Pay near me is the one with a large cash network, Right? So that's a huge, huge differentiation right now for them is that you can go to CVS's, Seven Elevens, Walgreens. Whoever's in the cash network, the customer scans the little barcode on their phone and they can give cash directly to the customer, to the teller at the cvs. I love that. I would.

I think that's so useless. I think it's so useless.

I would love to get rid of all cash payments in my dealership. Do you accept cash in your dealership?

Yeah, but it's not much. I mean, like, it's so anyway I, so I, I see the value. I see the value. I just like oh, I don't know.

Right. But you're not a heavy Hispanic community, right? No, I'm not.

That's right. I'm not.

Not heavily Hispanic. So those in Texas me, those that have a heavy Hispanic customer base, they are largely cash payers. Right?

Yeah, I can see that.

Yes. Not the majority of my payments, but a good majority of my payments are cash payments. I don't like the idea of my girls collecting cash. Right. I would love to get rid of that so that A, I never have to go to the frickin bank and take deposits. B there's no opportunity for fraud. C there's no opportunity for theft or robbery because people just know we don't have cash. So I love that idea. Blitzpay is in talks to get that going but it's not reality right now. So.

No. And it's been, they've been in talks for a bit of time now and I think, I think once again repay are same. Same type of situation on that.

It wouldn't even, it's not even like a here like with, with Pay Near Me it's. I give the teller cash, it gets loaded directly. The payment is then directly credited to my Pay Near Me account which updates my dms. Whereas the Blitz pay system will be like a preloaded account where you go to these places, you give them cash, it loads into an account and then the customer then has to transfer the money from that account to Blitzpay to make their payment. So it adds a little bit of an extra step because of the way that they're trying to get their bank set up. This is what I understood from trying to feel them out a little bit. So those are the basic forms. Right. I do think that making sure your Portal has Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay options, I think that's huge because I know a lot of my customers get paid that way.

Yeah, it's. It every day it's getting more and more which is, you know, they, I don't, I wouldn't want to be these people. They've got to be, they got to be on top of this stuff because there's a new, there's a new cash app every day, you know.

Yeah. And I think that's where Blitzpay falls a little behind. I don't. From what I understood, they do not have a cash app or a PayPal or a Venmo integration. I asked them that and I think they're the ones that don't have that right now. I don't know if it's in the works.

They seem to be on the cutting edge of things, so I would assume that they're working on it.

Yeah. So we'll see if they get to that real quick. Luke, good time. When we're talking about cash and talking about getting your cash, it's a Primal end situation for getting cash, man.

I tell you, I need some more cash, Jeff. Can you loan me some? I have blown through some cash this year. We're selling cars and we're growing. It's a good time to grow. I think we're going to see this growth heading, you know, for 24 months probably. And you've got to have it. You got to have a team member, and primaland is a good team member. They care about your business. They can teach you, do it the right way. And they got money. They got money to lend. So make sure that you have those relationships, Jeff, because I am. I'm working hard with my local bank right now to. To finish things up. But if, you know, if I need money, I know I can call primaland. They'll hook me up.

Yeah. So rates are not good right now, obviously, primary. You guys all know it's high. Not the best time as far as getting a low rate goes. But guess what? If you can get approved and the rate does. Pencil. Right now, you're going to be good when it goes down. Right. So get an adjustable. Make sure you're locked in. You might participate in some more rate hikes in the next, you know, year or so, but I can't imagine it's going to go drastically higher than it is now. I just don't think the feds would allow that outside of some crazy meltdown.

Yeah.

I've also heard that banks are being a little more aggressive. You know, some of the talk that they're maybe loosening up a little bit and they're looking to place capital right now. So this could be a good time, you know, talk to the guys out there.

It's always a good time to talk to Primal in because they will help figure out how to make it. Pencil.

Yep.

Give them a call.

So speaking of, just to wrap this up, guys, talking about getting your money now, all of these processors will basically batch out your processes for the day, and you get them within about 24 hours. I think they're all about the same. 24 to 48 hours, depending on, you know, the clearinghouse, the bank that was used. But it will all come in as one Deposit. Right. They're not hitting each little card. It all comes in as one deposit. Now, what they do differently and what I don't like is the ones that give me a net deposit. Right. So say I ran a thousand dollars today and I was at a 2% processing fee, they're going to give me, you know, $980.

Yeah, I don't like that either.

That give me an accounting nightmare.

It is. How many of those do that, Jeff?

No chargebacks are taken out? I don't think so. I didn't get a straight answer from Blitzpay on that.

They don't. They don't know it's a one.

You ran $1,000 today, they would give you the thousand dollars.

Yeah, 100%.

Okay. The other thing that you need to watch out is chargebacks. So I know Ree Pay does chargebacks individually because I just had six of them a couple days ago. So you'll see those come out as separate line items, which I think is handy because I don't want them to be netted out at the end of the day. But pay near me also does that their disputes are taken out per transaction. I think it was blitz pay that it's actually a net situation. So if you processed a thousand today, but you had a $500 chargeback that someone initiated and happened to hit at the same time would actually only get a check for 500 that night or a deposit for 500, you know, so that to me is a little annoying. I don't want it to be netted together. I want those to be separate so that I can actually see them. But, you know, that's my own preference.

Yeah. I mean, it's not in the world. And some of these, some of these companies are really help fight chargebacks for you. And so listen to them when they talk about chargebacks and, and how it. How they can help you not have as many and also what they can do to fight them for you. This is a big deal. And certain ways you take these cards and the way they're structured inside these credit card processing can help you if someone tries to. Tries to claw back and say they didn't do it, when in fact they did. So be mindful of that when you're interviewing these folks too.

So speaking of my story, had a customer dispute six of her monthly payments. Right. So going back three months, she disputed all six of the payments with a code that she never received the merchandise. That was the dispute reason. Right. And I'm like, well, that doesn't make any Sense like she has the car.

Yeah.

So I now have to jump through the hoops on all six of those disputes to upload her retail installment contract, her auto pay form, you know, like a signed birth certificate from her grandmother. Like it's. It's crazy. So the dispute thing is a real issue. I think that regardless of the way the customer processes, whether they do it on their own or whether you do it over the phone, they can still dispute it. You're just going to have a lot better case and probably less likely if the customer is the one initiating it through the portal. Right. That's why those portals are so important for a customer, because they are punching in that info. And even if it's a stolen credit card, like it's a stolen credit card, that's going to get challenged. Right. Regardless. But hopefully they aren't able to come back and dispute something that's a legitimate charge just because they're mad at you or just because you repoed their car or they thought their car was going to get repoed.

Right.

Right.

Yep. That's a big deal.

Yeah. Disputes are again in insanely infuriating that the bank can just yank that money out of your account because someone disputed it. And now what if I win the dispute? Does that money automatically come back in? Is it held in escrow somewhere or is this customer already spent it?

No, I think it is held. I think the bank holds it. So yeah, be mindful of it.

Two final points, Luke. Servers, that's a big issue. Right. We've had times with my current processor where stuff just didn't work. And whether it's the server's fault or whether it was the integration with the payment platform, they all blame each other. Repay and Pay near me are both on AWS Amazon servers. Blitzpay is on a Google server.

So they're all good. They're all good.

99.9 uptime, I'm sure don't know that that matters. The big thing is the integration between the two. And that's where we've had the rub is when for some reason they just didn't process. Right. You wake up in the morning and you think that these 10 payments were supposed to go through and for some reason they didn't go through. And then you're trying to figure out why they didn't. Right. Whose fault was it? Was it the payment processor? Was it your dms? And then my final point is follow up. So I think a lot can be told about a company when they're trying to get you on Board. Right. They roll out the red carpet.

Yeah.

Like they are on you, they are calling you and contacting you and hustling you. And if they're not doing that before, they definitely are not going to do it after.

Yeah, for sure.

Right. So interesting to me. You know, I spoke with Ree Pay. After seven days, I had to email them a follow up. Seven days after my online demo, my zoom call with them, I had no contact with them. They did not follow up. 7 days pay near me, I got like a funny little like grubhub gift certificate that said something like, thanks for, thanks for chatting with us. Here's a Grubhub, like $5 gift card to go get a pretzel or something. I don't know what that was all about. Seven days after I had to send a follow up. Oh man, Blitzpay. I got a same day email and follow up with the summary of the key points that we talked about that day. So for what that's worth, you know, you know, kudos to blitz pay for following up.

Well, this matters more than anything, Jeff. I mean, let's set the stage for this. Any of these software companies, if they have great customer service and they follow up when you need something that is 9, 10 of the battle, if you can get somebody on the phone or if you can get somebody to respond to an email and just hear you out, this can fix your problem almost immediately. So bear that in mind. Whenever you're, whenever you're deciding on a vendor, it's all about follow up and it's all about communication.

Yep. So a couple of tips on that end. When you are calling them and you're initiating or if you're following up on the conversation to get more data, try just going through the 800 number. Try going through the online help, try to get to your salesman through some other channel and see how that works. Right. Like call the customer service line and just see how long you're on hold and see what persons like that you talk to. You know, I've never thought about that.

That is great advice.

Yeah. Because think about it, because once you get them signed up, that's who you're going to be calling anyways. They're going to pass you over to the customer success rep or the customer service portal and it's like, oh, I didn't know that I was going to be on hold for 20 minutes every time I tried to call in to get some information. Because when I called my salesman directly, he picked right up. Right. Yeah. So try going through the 800 number to get or the web chat, you know, to see what that looks like. And definitely, definitely, definitely demo. So I've got a demo later today with one of the companies. I'm going to do an online demo to actually see what the backside looks like for my collector. Like, I'm going through those steps because when I make this switch, I mean, it's one of the hardest switches to undo. You know, DMS is number one, CRM is probably number two. And your payment processor probably a very, very close.

It's website dms, they're about the same when it comes to aggravation.

Yeah, yeah. So, anyways, be sure you're doing your homework up front. Hope this was helpful, everyone. Dealers helping dealers. Please leave us a review and subscribe the Independent Dealer podcast.