Payments overview
BRM has two approaches to payment handling depending on whether we're talking about the front end (Online Booking Wizard) or the back-end (admin console)
Online Booking Wizard (OBW)
For the front end, customer facing portal, we do accept payments so that your clients can secure their bookings, when they book online. We do this by integrating the OBW with 3rd party payment gateways. Currently the payment gateway options for this are: (*subject to geographical availability)- Stripe - www.stripe.com N.B. Stripe also acts as a secure credit card vault
Back Office
For the BRM admin console (back-end), we take a different approach to payments. Rather than processing payments we instead record payments. We take this approach because typically businesses have existing credit card machines and don't want to change when they start using BRM / RSM. Furthermore businesses want to negotiate a deal with a local card supplier to get the best possible transaction rates. These gateways are very numerous and BRM / RSM cannot integrate with every payment gateway in the world. There are really two types of payment in the business world today:- card present transaction - i.e. in-store, normally chip and pin. These will be the lowest possible rates and are normally best negotiated with your local merchant supplier or bank.
- card not present transactions - i.e. e-commerce / online (Stripe etc). Customer types in card details, and is typically used when a customer is at home shopping online. Payment gateways charge a higher transaction rate as the fraud risk is greater.
This link will show you you can use BRM to record payments. (either ad hoc, or as part of a stage transition)
Please note that there is an exception to all the above. If you choose Stripe as your payment gateway for online booking, we also make available a payment button in your back-office as a convenience. We would not expect high-volume bike shops to ever use this facility, for the reasons stated above, however some smaller operations might find it convenient to have this option, until they have a more optimal in-store payment mechanism.