Can I offer ACH and Credit Card Payments?

On a $4,000 embroidery order, the difference between taking payment by card and taking it by bank transfer is roughly $115. That is most of a decorator's margin on the job, and it is decided by which button you put in front of the customer.

What each method actually costs

Card processing is priced as a percentage plus a fixed fee, so the cost scales with the order. ACH — a direct bank-to-bank transfer, sometimes called e-check — is usually priced as a flat fee or a capped percentage, so it does not.

Your own rates will differ — check your merchant statement rather than trusting a headline rate — but the shape holds. Cards are fine on small orders and expensive on large ones. For a shop whose average order is a few hundred dollars, card fees are a cost of doing business. For a shop landing four-figure school and corporate contracts, they are a line item worth managing.

When to offer each

Most shops that handle this well do not pick one. They steer by order size and customer type.

• Cards for retail, walk-in and small web orders. The fee is small in absolute terms and the convenience closes the sale. Making a $180 customer fill in bank details will lose you the order.
• ACH for contract, school, corporate and repeat wholesale. These customers are already used to paying by bank transfer, often prefer it, and the saving is real.
• Card for the deposit, ACH for the balance is a common pattern. You get the deposit instantly so production can start, and the larger balance moves at the cheaper rate.

Can a customer pay an ACH invoice with a credit card?

Not directly — they are two different payment rails. What you can do is offer both on the same invoice and let the customer choose. If you have quoted an ACH price and the customer wants to pay by card, you have three honest options:

• Absorb it. Simplest, and often right for a customer you want to keep.
• Offer an ACH discount. Quote the card price as standard and show a discount for paying by bank transfer. This is legal in every US state and is how most shops handle it.
• Add a card surcharge. Legal in most states but restricted in some, capped by the card networks, and it must be disclosed before checkout. Check your state and your merchant agreement first.

The discount framing and the surcharge framing can produce the same numbers, but customers respond very differently to them. A discount for paying by bank feels like a reward; a fee for paying by card feels like a penalty, and it generates the phone calls.

The slower part: ACH takes days, cards take minutes

Card authorisations clear immediately. ACH typically settles in one to four business days, and can fail after the fact if the account details are wrong or the funds are not there. That matters when the payment is the trigger for ordering blanks.

The practical rule most shops land on: do not start production on an unsettled ACH payment from a new customer. For an established account with a payment history, the risk is small enough to ignore and the wait will cost you more than the exposure.

Getting the fees out of your margin calculation

The mistake that quietly costs money is quoting from garment and decoration cost, then discovering the processing fee afterwards. On thin-margin contract work that is the difference between a profitable job and a break-even one.

Build the expected processing cost into your pricing the same way you build in a rush charge or a screen fee — as a known input, not a surprise at settlement.

How this works in PromoSoft

Both methods are switched on per shop under Settings → Payments, and both appear on the customer's payment page so they choose at checkout. Payments post back against the order, so what is paid, what is outstanding and which method was used are visible on the order itself rather than in a separate merchant dashboard.

Accepting online payments at all requires a merchant account, and the provider will verify your business first — usually a few days. Start that before you need it.

Related: invoicing and getting paid.