Most flooring dealers have been burned in the past with the costs of credit card processing. Chad Ogden, president of QFloors, shares insights into what retailers need to know to about credit card processing, surcharges and how to save thousands of dollars on transactions sold using credit cards.
Chad: We have our software platform, which is QFloors. We've been doing that for 25 years now. For the majority of that time, our customers have needed to have the ability to collect payments from their customers with credit card payments. So we've gone through several partnerships in this area and learned some things along the road. We would partner with a credit card processing company and those companies tend to get acquired on a pretty frequent basis. They'll build up their customer base, then a larger company will come in and buy them. That's happened two or three times to us now. Usually it goes great with the smaller company. But when the bigger company purchases it, all the agreements and everything that we have with the smaller company are out the window. They start raising prices on our customers. Everything we were promising our customers would go away. So, that's kind of been kind of the pattern. But throughout the years I've learned what to do and what not to do. I've learned more about the finer points that go along with all of this, and how it actually works. In this industry it's really difficult with a lot of lack of integrity. Navigating those waters and helping our customers, because, when I recommend something, it reflects poorly upon us in our company if we’re recommending something that is not up to our standards. Just recently, we had this relationship that was really good for a long time. But then, again, the big company swoops and buys them, so we were kind of tired of that. What ended up happening is, about three years ago, we started our own credit card processing company so that we could control the price, the support and our customer experience, and we were no longer having to rely upon a partner to do that. That's where Qpay, the name of our new company and is owned by QFloors came. We created another company called Mountaintop Payments, which is for customers that don't have QFloors. So just a more generic credit card processing company.