Make it easy for your trade customers to pay

Easier payments

Dealing with business customers can be immensely lucrative. That said, invoicing and following up can often be a big cost. The impact of late payments on your cashflow can be huge. Not to mention, the cost of keeping extra cash just to cover the lag between paying expenses and getting paid, only grows as you grow.

It’s also not much fun to be following up with customers asking about late payments. Things like this should just be smooth. In the immortal words of Dr. Dre, ‘Getting paid is a forte’… tune!

Making payments smoother and simpler

We’ve been thinking about this challenge for a while. Thanks to recent conversations with our customers, we’re delighted to present a solution.

In iStockist, your trade customers can currently login and view their order history. They can pay by credit card when they order, or pay later by invoice.

There’s a couple of reasons why the customer might not choose to pay immediately by credit card, but might want to at a future point. For example, 1) They might not have their credit card on them when they are placing the order. Or, 2) the person who makes the order, may not be the same person who makes the payment.

We’re introducing the ability for your trade customer to login anytime and pay an existing invoice by credit card. This gives you a couple of very powerful tools.

Telesales + smoother invoicing

First, you can take an order by phone or email, and quickly tap it into iStockist, to generate the invoice for the customer. The customer can then login and pay the invoice by the due date, as per the credit terms you have set up for them.

Interestingly, and as a bonus, this works nicely for many out-of the ordinary use cases. For example, let’s say you do services, like providing a once-off custom solution for your customer. You would not want to make it available through your online ordering portal, as it’s a one-time thing.

Instead, you can take the order for the customer, and generate the invoice. The customer can then access the invoice in your trade portal and make the payment by card credit, or use the bank details on file to make a transfer.

Online orders + a more frictionless payment mechanism

Secondly, let’s take the case where your customer is about to place an order with you online, but forgets their credit card, or needs permission before making the payment. Now, the order can still be placed. Later on, the right person on the customer’s team can login at a separate time and make the card payment.

In summary, your customers now have a bunch more ways to pay you, at their convenience. And the likelihood of late payments, is diminished! Hooray!

We know there’s still a lot of ways to improve invoicing and payments. We want to keep finding ways to make it easier to pay, and get paid! We’re always open to suggestions.

Any questions? Feel free to contact us.
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