Bridge

Have you ever had your PayPal, Stripe, or ShopPay account frozen and all of your money locked up? Are you working multiple brands, possibly under multiple currencies, and want them all under one account? Are you tired of your payment processor being a robot and want to work through your issues with an actual human being? Bridge can help with all of it.

Bridge is a payment processor built specifically for eCommerce, and especially some of the eCommerce verticals that find it tough to process with your broader, larger payment providers.

The Bridge team sits down with you, looks at your past data and industry data, let's you know of your risks and opportunities, where the business can improve from a financial and processing standpoint, and then they give you a custom rate based on this risk. Onboarding is purposefully manual for your account, to make sure that you can be helped and approved.

From there, they create a rolling reserve account for you (different from a hold), keeping a balance with Bridge, mitigating the risk of a hold and helping to handle all of your chargebacks or refunds.

As your account matures (after 3 months of active processing) you will be able to do same day payouts.

Bridge makes it easy to work under multiple Merchant Identification Numbers (MID), and you can open them with multiple financial institutions, and they can run in multiple different currencies. This allows you to get better transaction rates across regions and brands, saving you serious money. With competitor payment processors, they only allow you one account in one currency, and force convert all transactions into that currency, costing you a lot in foreign exchange fees. With Bridge, you can save something like 1.2% - 2% of revenue! Which can often be something like 7%-12% additional profit!!

Bridge makes it easy to export your transactions, refunds, processing fees, etc., into one csv or spreadsheet and upload that to your Quickbooks or Xero or however your accounting team/firm likes to handle transaction data.

Bridge is a human to human payment processor for troubled and at-risk accounts who are doing real business, but fall into categories that the larger payment processors simply don't understand. Between that and their ability to manage multiple accounts in one dashboard, open accounts in different currencies and avoid foreign exchange teams, and the way that their fraud and risk assessment teams work with you to help your business grow, they really are a smaller, niche payment processor.

First of all, Bridge keeps your payment processing uptime higher. By lowering your risk of shutdown, you can make/save $10,000s. If you've ever had your payment processor shutdown and locked, and had to shutdown your entire store, you know this is HUGE.

More importantly, even if you aren't at risk of shutdown, Bridge is going to save you 1.2% - 2% of your international transaction fees/foreign exchange fees, which is going to have a nominal impact on profit, often increasing profit by 7%-12%.

And most importantly, you may be able to lower your overall transaction rate down to as little as ~1%. You're probably paying something like 2.5% right now, so that would be a savings of 1.5% of revenue, which is another 7%-12% profit!

Bridge will likely be set up by your Chief Financial Officer (CFO), CEO, or a mix of your account and head of eCommerce. A majority of setup is meeting with the Bridge team and understanding the business, and then of course you need to get the payment gateway setup on your site, which takes only a few minutes and requires some copy pasting of your API keys into the Shopify backend.

Bridge specifically works with at-risk merchants, like CBD, supplements, adult, and other categories where there is a risk of fraud from your customers or chargebacks.

They can work with starting stores, but you wouldn't necessarily need to start with Bridge, your problem kind of emerges as you take transactions and then need to switch to Bridge. Pricing starts at 2.75% + $0.29 per transaction for under $100k/month. Larger merchants, over $100k/month in sales, are better fits. And especially merchants over $350k/month become very great fits for using Bridge.

The more international currencies you need to sell in, and the more Merchant IDs you need, the more you should be considering Bridge.

They DO NOT work with scammers and spammers or merchants trying to defraud their customers, and they will shut those down ASAP. They won't even get through the vetting process.