Here’s how adding ACH as a payment option is an expression of our customer service obsession.
Managing our members’ composting subscriptions at Perennial City with Stripe has been an essential part of allowing us, as a husband and wife team, build a sustainable small business. Not needing to chase invoices or make regular trips to the bank means administrative help hasn’t been required to get started. Straightforward, simple reporting is motivating and makes us happy. Most importantly, Stripe leads the industry in security, and since they store all payment information we are not required to maintain PCI-compliance on our end.
“Invaluable” would be a most accurate description for this service. Therefore, not cheap. Our credit card processing fees in our first year of operating this unique urban farming enterprise were a greater expense than co-working space, our mobile coop and hens(the heart of our operation), and marketing, combined. Assessing these costs at the end of 2018, it was clear we needed to make some decisions.
We proudly offer the best price we’ve seen in this fast-growing and important new trade. In other cities, weekly compostables pickup regularly ranges from $30 to $45 per month or more. When our members commit to keeping their food scraps from going to waste for 6 months at a time, we reward them with a discounted rate that evens out to just $20 a month. We love offering this great deal, and did not want to have to adjust our pricing to offset credit card fees.
We found the solution from the same payment processing provider — ACH is an option quietly hanging out in the Stripe dashboard. While card fees through Stripe are .30 plus 2.9% per transaction, when you authorize an account for ACH, it costs less than 1% with no additional flat rate. Managing payment sources through our website is a new feature (we put up the most basic site to get going), so we began directly offering ACH when folks needed to update their payment source. When we rolled out our full web application early this year, we built bank authentication using Plaid into the sign-up process and in our member’s account page. Instead of the traditional process of following up with micro-deposit amounts to authenticate your bank, Plaid allows you to log in directly to your online banking to connect an account.
Making this happen was a lot of work. The additional logic has been the majority of work on our software for the past 3 or 4 months. It’s also pretty funny that Perennial City — a small, urban farm — is using Plaid, because this is the same software you might use to connect your bank to enterprise-grade stock trading services. But, we are very serious about customer service, and this is an expression of our dedication to our members. While some people enjoy prefer to use a card, we invested a lot into making it incredibly easy to link a bank account fee-free. This allows us to keep home compostable pick-up as accessible as possible.
These savings will add up in a big way in the near future. Currently, subscription renewals happen every one, three, or six months. We are incredibly excited to soon be adding to our offerings full-circle flowers and vegetables, joining the most amazing eggs we’ve been delivering since last fall. When our members are adding produce to their weekly bucket swaps, .30 and 2.9% will quickly add up.
We love responding to all requests and questions, providing the cleanest buckets reliably every week, and offering a wonderful value for the work we provide. We have been fanatic about providing our chickens the best possible diet and environment to be their healthiest and happiest, producing the most wonderful eggs. Just as we consistently and uncompromisingly improve other areas of our company, it delighted us to track down a way to be able to continue to offer the best value possible. Enjoy!
