The Price Of Taking Gym Payments
In sales, they say something like, "you’re only as good as your last paycheck!" That rings true for small gym business owners too. So, it’s a problem if a service takes a payment on your behalf and delays sending funds to your bank account. One of the most useful automations for a small fitness studio or gym is the one that keeps the payments flowing in, without delays or excessive amounts of work on your part. Unfortunately, that’s not always a given. Allow me to explain.
Taking Recurring Payments For Memberships
The system you use to collect monthly payments should be a tool and not a burden. And it certainly shouldn’t make you feel like you’re always waiting to get paid. As a gym business owner, you’re going to have to deal with the cost and mechanisms of collecting recurring membership payments one way or another. So you have to find the system that balances the need for speed and the demands of secure processing.
When it’s time to integrate your gym management and membership accounts with a system like Gym Insight, you’ll get some of your biggest time savings from automating the monthly billing and payment collection. You might have started out using hand-held card readers at the front desk, but they’re limited to single transactions; they aren’t set up to hold billing information and to take recurring payments. The result is that you have to put in the time and effort every time your members pay; this is expensive for you and gets to be tiresome for them after a while.
What you need is a facility that enables you to take information one time and automatically charging the card each month. This is the equivalent of doing the work once and getting residual payments for it. Sure, you’ll still have to work to keep the gym open but you’ll be able to focus your energies on other issues. It is about as close to a passive income as you can get in the fitness business. It also means you need fast and trustworthy payment processing.
Gym Business Payment Peculiarities
There are two ways to get the payment from members to you: Either you have a wired billing service or an API gateway that passes the funds directly to you. Unfortunately, in this industry, payment services prefer to take the funds from your members and then distribute them to you in their own sweet time, passing them through their own accounts. In addition, the standard practice is to deduct a percentage commission from it for the privilege of having taken your money.
For a small business owner delays like this are excruciating and infuriating! You have the risks of delayed payments and an added cost of sales; like you need any more of those! The other and best alternative for the monthly billing is an API-based payment gateway that cuts out the middle step and delivers the payment directly from the members to you.
This is the Gym Insight approach; we never impound the funds, which go directly to your bank account. In addition, we only charge a flat fee per transaction, so you don’t lose a bigger slice of the payment for a bigger income. That means your return on investment improves when you add premium-valued services to your clients.
Providing A Fast And Flat-Fee Gateway
Gym Insight started small and has grown. I’ve personally been a gym owner and I understand the frustration of waiting for the funds to flow through. I have specifically designed the billing services of Insight to support our clients without holding them hostage.
By using an API-based system rather than impounding payments, we never take control of the funds that are the lifeblood of your business, we just make the process easier and more reliable for you. If you haven’t signed up for it already, check out how we can make monthly recurring payments go straight from your membership to you, without that awkward stop in between.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. Differentiating Price and Value In Premium Gym Memberships. January 9, 2015. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3057-premium-gym-memberships/ (accessed October 4, 2015).