Centralizing your online payments is becoming more important as the online payment tool landscape gets more fragmented. In the past, it was an achievement to be able to take payments multiple ways online. Now it serves more as a hurdle. Here’s why…
Centralized payment processing means that all of your payment goes through a single processor and/or platform. Think of your traditional local store, every cash register is tied to the same processor on the backend. This provides the company a single path for money to flow into the business. Thus, making it easier to extrapolate and analyze your incoming financials.
What technology has done is allow businesses of all types to process payments in more than one way online. Which means you can now have your payment data in multiple platforms and your new job is centralizing it all.
It wasn’t until I saw the backend of a couple very successful online businesses that I realized central processing was the way to go. In both cases, though using different payment platforms, they could easily log into one place and see all the revenue they had generated in courses and services.
When I probed them about certain metrics about their business they were able to pull them up practically immediately. I loved the ease of it and could instantly see the correlation between their massive success and their ability to easily see their income financials under one roof.
Since that point on I have used ThriveCart* exclusively for all of my online purchases (and some offline purchases). With their latest update it’s making me feel even better about this choice.
In this post, ThriveCart announced a Business Insights Dashboard. A single dashboard to provide various business metrics that are customizable to your liking.
They also added Dunning functionality that allows you to send out reminders around upcoming and overdue payments.
To top it off there’s a new Subscription Area as well. To see who has active subscriptions, what recurring revenue to anticipate, and more.
Of course if you are in the e-Commerce space your central processing is taken care of for you since all of your sales go through your site. But if you sell services, online courses, or any type of digital products you will need to start centralizing your income data sooner than later.
