SYMPLE Review

• Payment Services
• Other Services
  • Gift and Loyalty Programs
  • Online Ordering for Restaurants
  • Working Capital
• Reporting
• Symple Rates and Fees
  • Pricing for Add-Ons
• Symple Reviews

Payment Services

For payment processing, Symple allows you to accept payments online or in person. The company offers both tablet-based point of sale systems and portable processing options for businesses that accept payments on the go. If you need to invoice your clients or set up recurring billing, you can do that, too. (Note that invoicing has separate costs, noted in the pricing section later in this review.)

The POS option lets you take payments, manage inventory, keep track of customers, manage employees and vendors, and more. The iPad system is cloud-based, and incurs a monthly fee on top of the costs of accepting cards. If you’d prefer a non-iPad system, Symple supports Poynt.

The ecommerce options allow you to use a gateway and optional shopping cart to accept payments on your website. Hosted and API integration options are available. The API option allows you to customize your checkout more fully, while the hosted option requires minimal IT knowledge.

Through either method, you can choose to accept credit and debit cards and electronic checks. (Note that electronic checks incur separate fees.) Symple boasts that it has no contracts and provides next-day funding.

Other Services

In addition to the payment processing and reporting services detailed above, Symple offers gift and loyalty card programs, online ordering for restaurants, and working capital programs.

Gift and Loyalty

Symple offers gift card and loyalty programs to help you increase sales and encourage repeat visits. Gift cards can be customized with your logo and font choice from a selection of fonts. Your customers can choose the amount of the gift card, and cards are reloadable. There are no per-transaction fees for you when customers redeem their gift cards. The minimum quantity to get started is 500 cards at $1.25/each, but volume discounts are available if you order more cards.

The loyalty program is an opt-in service that customers can sign up for at the register by providing their phone number. Businesses can set rewards levels and points are tracked automatically.

Online Ordering for Restaurants

Restaurants that want to offer the convenience of online ordering can use Symple’s online order program for an additional monthly fee. The online ordering service lets you add a menu, accept payments through the service, receive order notifications at your restaurant, and even provide customers with a real-time order status so they know when their order is ready. This option is available even for restaurants that don’t have their own dedicated website.

Working Capital

Symple offers a working capital program to allow businesses access to funding for expenses like inventory purchases, marketing, and more. Businesses can apply for up to $250,000 with a short application.

Reporting

Online reporting capabilities let you view fund deposits and monthly processing statements or manage outstanding chargebacks, while the PCI compliance tool helps you stay compliant with processing requirements.

Symple Rates and Fees

Symple offers 0% markup (subscription-style) pricing, meaning you’ll pay a higher monthly fee, a per-transaction fee, and no percentage markup. In some cases, this type of pricing can be more competitive, but not always. It’s important to take all factors into account. To learn more about 0% markup pricing and see example math on the costs, check out our article on subscription merchant accounts.

As of autumn 2017, Symple offers 4 plans: Standard, Professional, Premium, and Enterprise. All plans will pay the costs of interchange and the processor’s markup as seen in the image below.

The costs are as follows:

• Standard: $29/month and 25 cents per transaction
• Professional: $49/month and 15 cents per transaction
• Premium: $69/month and 10 cents per transaction
• Enterprise: $99/month and 5 cents per transaction

Symple charges additional fees for “add-on” products, including ecommerce shopping carts and gateways, gift/loyalty programs, online ordering capability for restaurants, electronic check acceptance, and electronic invoicing. These costs are addressed in the “Pricing for Add-Ons” section, below.

It’s also important to note that just because there’s no percentage markup doesn’t mean you won’t still have percentage-based costs. In the image above, Symple specifies that you’ll pay X per transaction + interchange. As you can see from this snippet of Visa’s interchange table, below, interchange costs are charged as a percentage of the transaction as well as a per-transaction fee in cents. (Note that your specific interchange charges will vary. This image is provided as an example of the many rates and fees involved at the interchange level. Read more about interchange.)

If this all sounds a bit confusing, not to worry. You can skip the research and compare pricing from Symple to other processors easily using CardFellow’s free quote comparison tool. It will show you the costs with all fees included, so you don’t need to worry whether you’re missing a fee when deciding between processors. Give it a try!

Pricing for Add-Ons

As noted above, there is an additional charge for several features that Symple considers “add-ons.”

If you use Symple’s ecommerce shopping cart option, there are additional monthly fees. The Basic shopping cart has a monthly fee of $29, the Plus shopping cart costs $79/month, and the Pro cart will run you $229/month. The primary difference between the carts is how many staff accounts you can have (2 for Basic, 5 for Plus, 15 for Pro) and a few advanced features like email accounts, newsletter capabilities, abandoned cart recovery options, and loyalty rewards programs. The Pro account includes all of those advanced features, while the Plus account includes emails and newsletters. (The Basic cart doesn’t offer any of those 4 advanced features.)

• There is an additional 10 cent fee per transaction for using the ecommerce gateway.
• For restaurants that want to offer online ordering, you’ll pay $49/month.
• Businesses that want to accept electronic checks will pay 25 cents per transaction.
• Invoicing a client will cost you 10 cents per transaction.
• If you choose to use the iPad point of sale system, it will cost you $49/month.
• Businesses implementing a gift or loyalty card program can expect rates for the program starting at $19/month.

You don’t have to do the math yourself to see what you’ll really  pay. Use CardFellow’s free price comparison tool to see all costs for taking cards.

Symple Reviews

Customer reviews for Symple are non-existent online. The company doesn’t have a Better Business Bureau profile, Yelp page, or Google Reviews. Symple doesn’t include customer testimonials on its website, and while the company does list social media links (including Facebook) on its website, the links to social media sites don’t actually take you to any social media pages for the company. A manual search of Facebook doesn’t bring up a Symple Facebook page, either, so there are no reviews to report from Facebook.

Have you used Symple at your business? What did you think? Leave a review!