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The payment process is one of the core aspects of conducting e-commerce business. This applies to the B2B industry that provides employee uniform programs, as well.
While you may want to provide the most convenient and feasible payment option for your customers, you also need to provide more than one payment option as that will attract a wider variety of customers and encourage larger purchases.
The available payment options in the B2B space are completely different than those that are available for the B2C industry. This holds especially true if you provide apparel programs to large organization with thousands of employees.
So, in this article, we will get you acquainted with 7 payment options or ledger types you can assign to your uniform programs for maximum convenience and functionality.
1. Allowance
2. Company pay
3. Payroll deduct
4. Personal/Business Credit Card
5. Points
6. Purchase Order
7. Store credit
Allowance or uniform allowance is a certain value of money provided by the employer to the employee to purchase uniforms.
This allowance may be provided to the employee at the time of joining the organization or periodically.
For example, an employee that is given an allowance of $2000 to purchase uniforms in a given year. When the employee logs into a uniform store website, this allowance amount will be readily available in their account for purchase.
The employee can either purchase uniforms within this allowance value or add another mode of payment to complete the purchase.
An allowance can be provided to employees either as a one-time joining bonus or a periodically renewed option based on the business requirement.
Company pay is a pretty straightforward payment option that you can include in your uniform program.
The company or organization will set a certain value amount with which a particular employee or group of employees can purchase uniforms in a given period.
These employees, when they order within the set value, will not be asked for any payment as the company will be making the payment at a later point of time.
However, the employee can be given an option to purchase higher value uniforms than the set amount by combining company pay with another payment option.
Payroll deduct option works similarly to allowance and company pay.
It’s a virtual amount of points that are available in an employees’ account.
The employee will be able to view the points in their account, add uniforms or merchandise to the cart that is equal or within the allotted value amount, and then finally check out.
The amount value of this purchase will be later deducted from the employee’s forthcoming salary.
An employee can be allowed to use a Personal Credit Card either as a standalone payment option or by combining it with other payment options at the time of check out.
The business credit card on the other hand is a payment option that can only be used by specific members of an organization who are responsible to purchase uniforms for employees who are grouped under them.
These members are known as purchase agents within the uniform industry. They place orders for certain assigned employees and use a business credit card at the time of purchase.
The purchase agents in this case may or may not require an approval from a higher authority for the order quantity or value.
Certain organizations, in a bid to encourage their employees to perform better at their work, provide them with points for every task they complete or how efficiently they work.
These points can be later used by the employees in specific uniform stores to redeem for a similar value product like a merchandise or an accessory.
Unlike a regular purchase order, the employee in this case will be given a purchase code by the organization.
When an employee uses a purchase code given to them at the time of checkout, the order will go through as per usual.
These purchase codes will be tagged with their respective order values. At the end of a specific period, the distributor will take all of these orders into consideration and send a purchase order to the organization.
For store credit, an organization allots a certain amount for the uniform needs of all the employees and pays the distributor or store in advance.
The employees of that organization will receive a credit from that specific store to purchase uniforms within the provided credit value and check out without having the need to make a payment.
In order to ensure that employees are not misusing this feature, the admin or the employer can chose to assign quotas or uniform allotment to all or specific employees. These employees will be able to place orders for a limited quantity of uniforms only.
The beauty of a great uniform program is that all of these features can be tweaked or customized to meet the business requirement of the end user or an organization.
One important functionality is to set a payment precedence. With this, the admin or the employer can select the order of priority when it comes to payment options and the percentage amount that can be utilized from each payment mode.
For example, an employer chooses store credit, allowance, and personal credit card as the primary modes of payment. These payment modes are also assigned a maximum percentage of amount that can be utilized for an order.
Let’s say…75% each for store credit and allowance, and 50% for personal credit card. In this case, the employee can complete the payment as per the set payment precedence.
However, in the event the employee happens to extinguish a specific payment option, he/she can choose to complete the payment using the next available payment mode.
