How to Adapt Electronic Payments For Your Business

As merchants shift to mobile point of sale (POS) solutions to capture increasing demand for online purchasing and offer contactless payment options, cash is progressively phasing out. Electronic payment options can also help improve cash flow which is critical to many businesses who don’t have extra time to spend hours chasing payments, or extra cash to survive delays or failure to collect payments using traditional payment processors. Two out of every five businesses go out of business because they’re unable to keep enough cash to pay employees and keep operations running. Businesses must improve these processes to survive an uncertain economic environment.

Accelerating sales with electronic payment processes

Collecting payment is sometimes only one piece of the puzzle. For many businesses, transactions require a signature on an order form or agreement in addition to the swipe of a credit card. However, this process rarely works in unison. Most businesses aren’t using technology to streamline the payment and signature process.

DocuSign Payments is a fast and easy way to request electronic payments and signatures in just one step. It’s simple for the customer: when it’s time to sign, the business requests payment. The customer can pay with a credit card, debit card, Stripe?,Apple Pay, and Google Pay. An approved payment allows the agreement envelope to complete, with the payment record included in the agreement’s audit trail. For the customer, it’s fast and convenient. For businesses, it eliminates the costs, delays, and non-payment risks of manual billing.

DocuSign and Stripe work in unison to accelerate the sales cycle. DocuSign takes on agreement preparation and signature, while Stripe enables payment collection at scale. Today’s competitive businesses require modern systems to accommodate payments. Enter the DocuSign integration with Stripe, which allows you to request payments at the time of a signed agreement and accelerate the sales process. 

The Marine Agency: streamlining payments with agreements

Despite the shock of having to shift long-held processes suddenly, many businesses successfully pivoted to online purchases with little notice.The Marine Agency is a team of seven employees providing business insurance to companies in the spa and personal care space. On average, the team at Marine Agency sends 400-500 proposals per month using DocuSign. While they had already been using DocuSign successfully for five years, they recently started using the Stripe integration to collect payments.

Before DocuSign and Stripe, The Marine Agency, like many businesses, was collecting signatures and payments manually. They relied on fax, mail, and email attachments. However, their business requires receiving agreements and payments at the same time, which manual processes did not allow.

The Marine Agency experienced typical bottlenecks before upgrading their payment system with the proper technology. With their traditional process, they received paperwork with missing payments and payments without paperwork. The team wasted time and resources searching for and matching checks with applications, resulting in decreased productivity. Also, the sales cycle, from inquiry to paperwork to proposal to payment, took up to 20 days!

When the Marine Agency began using the DocuSign with Stripe integration, the second piece of their problem was solved: streamlining payments with agreements. By combining electronic signature and optimized payment collection, they saw the following results:

• Reduced sales cycle that went from 20 days down to as little as 20 minutes
• Less time spent creating proposals by using templates and autofill features
• Sales volume more than doubled without adding headcount

Once shutdowns went into effect, the Marine Agency was able to pivot, running their business 100% remotely. It only took one hour for employees to set up their home offices. All of the information they needed to do their jobs was stored in easy to access digital repositories within DocuSign. Clients did not experience any interruptions in service and were still able to sign agreements and send payments as usual.

Businesses must use tools that enable unified payment and signature to streamline the payment process. By shifting away from inefficient payment collection processes, businesses can shorten the sales cycle, increase revenue, and lower their overhead.

Learn more about DocuSign Payments, the integration with Stripe, and The Marine Agency’s use case in our on-demand webinar How to Adapt Your Small Business in a Disruptive Environment.