One of the biggest differences between integrated payments and embedded payments is merchant support.
With integrated payments, the SaaS platform refers merchants to a payment provider and the merchant works directly with the payment provider. The integrated provider handles merchant onboarding and support, and might pay a small commission or revenue share to the SaaS platform.
On the surface, this sounds great – software platforms can earn a few basis points on payments without taking on any responsibility.
In the long run, the SaaS company misses out on a lot of revenue and enterprise value.
- The payment provider has their own relationship with the merchant, which makes SaaS product less sticky
- Merchants have to deal with two vendors, two support teams, and two portals, which leads to confusion and frustration
- The SaaS company doesn’t own the merchant experience and has to defer to the payment provider to resolve even the most rudimentary requests
Embedded payments, on the other hand, moves the payment provider to the background. A truly embedded payment provider gives platforms full control over the merchant experience, ownership of the merchant relationship, and the stickiness of a platform-branded payment product.
This results in a higher-quality payments experience that commands premium prices and increases platform margins, grows payments adoption and volume, and drives enterprise value for the platform.
The biggest challenge for a lot of platforms moving to embedded payments is merchant support. That’s why Rainforest is making merchant support easier with our pre-built helpdesk articles!
Our team has created an extensive set of helpdesk articles that you can utilize to streamline support operations and educate your merchants on payments.
These articles are designed to answer common questions, explain edge cases, and provide step-by-step instructions.
While most of the articles are ready for immediate use, some may require editing to match your specific configurations and setups. We used easy-to-follow color-coding to highlight the spots where you’ll want to add your platform-specific details. This ensures that all information provided is perfectly aligned with your portal and processes.
In order to shorten your time-to-value and help you quickly grow payments volume, we’ve made the pre-built helpdesk articles available to all Rainforest platform partners!
