Once your merchants are onboarded, accepting payments, and receiving payouts, there’s one more essential piece of the puzzle: ongoing account management.
Businesses are constantly evolving — merchants may need to update account details, adjust their services, track transactions, request support, or add new hardware. At the same time, you need visibility into their performance and support needs to maintain a seamless experience.
That’s where a well-designed account management portal comes in. It acts as the central hub for both you and your merchants, ensuring that everything from service adjustments to transaction tracking happens smoothly.
In this final part of our series, we’ll explore how SaaS platforms can integrate an account management portal into their payments offering — streamlining merchant operations, reducing friction and improving retention.
If you missed the previous posts, we covered:
- Part one: Merchant onboarding — getting users set up quickly and efficiently
- Part two: Payments acceptance — enabling seamless transactions
- Part three: Merchant payouts — ensuring funds flow smoothly
Now, let’s dive into account management — the key to providing long-term value and keeping merchants engaged.
Building Account Management Into Your Software Environment
Account management portals are a must-have tool for eliminating friction from your payments journey and improving the quality of your users’ experience. But, how you approach this functionality depends on your needs, your expertise and the resources you have available to tackle the job.
No-Code, Low-Code, and Custom Account Management Integrations
The first decision you need to make is how you want to integrate account management into your UX. Ultimately, your integration will look different depending on where your priorities lie.
No-Code Integrations: If speed-to-market and ease of deployment are your top priorities, your best bet is a no-code option like a pre-built, white-labeled account management portal. Ask potential payment processing partners:
- What kinds of portals they offer
- Whether or not you can add your own branding to them
- How your teams and your users can access them
Low-Code Integrations: If you’d like to keep users inside your software but don’t want to build an account management solution in-house, a low-code solution might be right for you. Low-code options allow you to embed account management components directly into your platform. This is a convenient option that provides some customizability and control. The downside is it may offer more limited feature sets than either no-code or fully custom options.
API-Driven Integrations: For the most control, you can build an API-driven custom account management portal that looks, feels and functions however you want it to. This route is the most resource-intensive, but it also provides the most flexibility. And, with the API connection to your processor, you can safely pull any key user data through the no-code standalone portal if needed.
The Benefits of a Centralized Portal
Both you and your users need an account management portal. But you can’t use the exact same solution, because there are a variety of functions that only you will need access to.
Rather than spending time building out a separate interface for both purposes, you can provide users with permissions-based access to a branded version of the same portal you use internally. Similar to how you might limit access to different teams within your internal systems, permissions-based access lets you wall off your users from features or information they don’t need while still giving them access to account management tools. You can even configure the UI so users won’t see features they can’t use.
This is one of the most efficient ways to provide account management — especially if there are commonalities between how you and your users will put a portal to work.
For example, dispute management is a critical part of minimizing losses and penalties from chargebacks, and both you and your users need access to it. The same goes for all of a user’s vital information and the ability to change it.
However, something like risk scoring is not something users should ever have access to, so that should be hidden. Or you may want to give users self-serve control over some value-added services, but not all. Permissions enable you to quickly adjust what your users, and even different classes of users, can see and do without having to go digging into the code.
The Importance of Great Account Management
The account management journey is an easy one to overlook, but it’s an extremely important part of payments monetization. Your account management portal provides centralized control over account updates, services, reporting, dispute tracking and much more. So integrating a feature rich and easy to use solution will go a long way toward ensuring your payment operations are frictionless and headache-free.
To find out more about account management and the other three critical payments journeys, read the first three parts of our series or reach out to a member of our team.