Are your payments costing your

From a small South London flat to over 85,000 customers globally, bank payments provider GoCardless is on a mission to show businesses that there's a better way to manage their payments

If someone asked you the total cost of managing your business's payments, how confident are you that your response would reflect the true overall figure? What factors spring to mind when trying to calculate it? Transaction fees seem like a natural starting point as they are the most visible and measurable cost.

But there are many other less-obvious costs associated with processing payments that, if left unmanaged, will only continue to grow. To assess the real cost that managing payments has on your business, you need to account for operational costs as well as payment-related issues.'

The hidden costs of payments

You may not have realised it, but how you collect payments has a direct impact on customer conversion and retention rates.

GoCardless and YouGov ran a payer preference survey, finding that 69% of payers abandon a checkout if it seems too complex, while 45% would abandon if required to manually enter details. So if potential customers have to suffer through an inconsistent or tedious payment process, they might look elsewhere.