Resources

Savvier Leverages Litle & Co. Partnership for Direct Response and Payments Reporting Savvy

 

Customer Profile

Formed in 2002, Savvier has quickly become one of the leading infomercial companies in the industry with expertise in product development, manufacturing, marketing and domestic / international distribution. Savvier has the direct response expertise and financial resources to bring concepts to the marketplace successfully. Savvier develops products in all the major direct response categories; the company specializes in fitness, kitchen, housewares and personal care. For more information visit:http://www.savvier.com.

Choosing a Payment Processing Partner

Unlike many companies that have been negatively affected by the economy, Savvier’s business continues to grow. Recent fluctuations in the economy have resulted in a reduction in general brand advertising, supporting Savvier’s ability to optimize Direct Response TV media buying cycles and the visibility of their products in the marketplace. In addition, as a virtual corporation, with relatively few employees to manage a very large segment of the business, it was imperative that Savvier establish business processes that allowed for seamless workflow and the ability to develop relationships with partners who know their business as they do. The partnership established with Litle & Co. allows Savvier to keep their staffing levels consistent throughout fluctuations in the economy.

When setting out to identify a new payment management and processing platform partner, Savvier had the following goals in mind:

  • Establish a more personal relationship with a processing platform partner that understands Savvier’s different merchant accounts

  • Optimize visibility into business performance, particularly in regard to chargebacks

  • Significantly reduce the amount of manual labor required to extract meaningful information from their payment data for the benefit of multiple divisions

  • Garner significant and sustained transactional savings by moving from a fixed cost agreement on recurring payments

  • Implement a platform with the ability to quickly and easily add new merchant accounts

  • Clarify customer lifecycles with transactional data

“If I was to choose one word to describe Litle & Co. it would be ‘partnership’— that’s the most important thing to us as a business. We’re a virtual corporation and we expect a partnership from all of our vendors that we work with. Litle comes up with new ways to help us, they listen to us and they take action. That’s the dividing line when determining which vendor we choose,” said Lew Elting, CFO of Savvier.

A Seamless Transition

After an initial meeting with Savvier, Litle & Co. provided immediate value to several areas of Savvier’s business. First, Litle was able to enter into an interchange chargeback agreement, allowing Savvier to significantly save on continuity payments. Then, and for each merchant account, Litle was able to break out transactions by product type enabling Savvier to distinguish between recurring transactions and single transactions. Examining merchant accounts individually provided a clearer view into payment dynamics, e.g. payments received over the Internet versus phone, and payments made on a one-time basis versus recurring. Up and running within 5-7 business days, Litle’s payment platform also delivered data analysis based on variables such as length of customer relationship, which is helpful as customer tenure can foreshadow chargeback tendency or merchant abandonment. The installed Litle & Co. solution, coupled with Litle’s unique approach to serving merchants, offered Savvier the ability to identify trends in customer relationships and adjust their processes in real-time.

Results

  • Seamless transition from their previous processor. Up and running in less than 1 week.

  • Detailed analytics-based reporting that proactively monitors, measures and fine-tunes the customer lifecycle, reducing much of the manual labor previously required

  • Ability to segment merchant accounts with no added fees

  • Significant cost savings with recurring payments through an interchange agreement

  • Multiple merchant category codes that directly reduced their interchange rates

Positioned for Continued Success

With Litle & Co., Savvier is confident that all the best processes are in place to help them enhance the value of their business. Taking the time at the onset of this relationship to truly understand Savvier’s business resulted in their increased understanding of account lifecycles and the ability to be nimble and to make changes as needed in real-time.

“The reporting helps us with our visibility so we don’t have to do a lot of manual labor in order to get the information we need when we need it. Litle’s reporting capabilities reduce the effort required to obtain important information to run our business,” said Lew.