Designed to help trade merchants protect their margins, the new EchoPay merchant toolkit pairs commercial card surcharging with pay-by-bank to give builders’, electrical, plumbing and timber merchants “two practical levers against rising card costs.”
“Trade merchants are running on tight margins, and for years they’ve simply had to swallow the cost of accepting commercial cards because the alternative was turning away good customers,” said James Ward, founder of EchoPay. “This toolkit changes that. Surcharging lets businesses stop subsidising their most expensive payment type, and pay-by-bank gives their customers a clean, low-cost way to pay that the business keeps the value of.
“It’s about protecting the margin they’ve already earned.”
The toolkit combines two complementary tools — commercial card surcharging and open banking pay-by-bank — letting merchants recover or avoid the card-processing costs that “quietly erode profit on every transaction.”
According to the Suffolk-based payments firm, those costs add up fast for trade merchants. It contends that a large share of takings comes from trade and contractor customers paying on commercial cards, and commercial card fees are not subject to the interchange caps that apply to consumer cards. The result is that some of a merchant’s most valuable B2B transactions are also it’s most expensive to accept — with the cost absorbed straight off the bottom line.
EchoPay’s toolkit is said to address this on two fronts:
Commercial card surcharging — Unlike consumer cards, commercial cards can lawfully be surcharged in the UK. EchoPay’s surcharging tool “automatically identifies commercial cards at the point of payment and applies a compliant surcharge, so the cost of accepting them no longer falls on the business’s margin.”
Pay-by-bank — Powered by open banking, pay-by-bank moves money directly from the customer’s bank account to the business’s, sidestepping card scheme fees altogether. Payments clear quickly and arrive with a clean reference, making reconciliation simpler.
And crucially for the trade sector, the toolkit has been developed to work “inside the systems merchants already use.” EchoPay is delivered through established ERP and trade software partners, so surcharging and pay-by-bank sit alongside a merchant’s existing trade counter, ordering and back-office processes rather than bolting on as a separate system.
The toolkit is available now to businesses across the UK. Email hello@echopay.co.uk for more information.
Testimonial:
Rob Eastwood, the MD of leading cask ale and craft beer wholesaler Small Beer and one of EchoPay’s most tenured customers, shared his experiences:
“Working with EchoPay is a no brainer. We take hundreds of card payments and paying less than £1 per transaction is much better than 2%. We’d heard some great feedback about EchoPay from our peers within Unitas, particularly from United Wholesale Scotland. It sounded too good to be true, but as we started to weigh it up, we realised there was no option not to do it.
“Some were sceptical of changing their payments at first, but over time they got used to it and now find it more convenient. We’ve now converted 50% of our customers to pay using EchoPay services. Those that move onto it don’t move away from it.”
