Stax Review

Pros & Cons

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Stax Overview

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Stax has processed an impressive $23 billion for over 20,000 customers to date, all without compromising its sky-high 98% customer retention rate.

However, it isn’t just another payment processor—it’s truly an all-in-one platform that covers your whole business, from invoicing and financials, to payment processing, inventory management, and customer engagement.

In short, Stax aims to make it simple to accept any payment type and manage your entire company without piecing together disjointed solutions from multiple third-party vendors.

Regardless of how you do business, you’ll have no problems getting everything you need, including hardware, software, and a merchant account. Stax even has specialty solutions like Stax Connect for SaaS companies and a full billing system for service providers.

With such a robust feature set, Stax comes at a premium price point.

But if you want an end-to-end merchant services provider that can grow as you grow, Stax delivers ease, convenience, and incomparable functionality in one package.

Stax Plans and Pricing

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Rather than nickel and diming you with transaction fees, Stax simplifies things with a flat monthly subscription fee. This gives you predictable costs month to month, allowing you to effectively budget and manage your finances.

The entry-level plan starts at $99 per month for businesses processing up to $250,000 annually. If your processing volume is between $250,000 and $500,000, the price jumps to $199 monthly. For anything above $500,000, custom pricing applies.

Stax also offers plans tailored to enterprises, service and utility providers, and SaaS companies.

The beauty of Stax’s pricing is that everyone gets full access to every feature, regardless of the plan. You won’t find yourself paying extra for capabilities like you would with other providers.

That said, Stax does offer optional add-ons like ACH processing, additional shopping carts, hardware protection, custom branding, next-day funding, digital gift cards, level 2 processing, and hardware purchases.

But the core service and functionality remains the same across every plan.

Stax recently acquired CardX, a great alternative if you prefer zero cost credit card processing—it’s a good fit for smaller business that tend to lose a lot of profit through transaction fees. Check out our full CardX review to learn more about it.

If you process less than $250,000 per year and don’t need all the features Stax provides, Payment Depot (also owned by Stax) is a more affordable monthly membership with no markup on transaction fees. You can learn more about it in our full review.

Overall, Stax operates multiple brands that cover the entire gamut of merchant services, from simple zero cost processing to a full business management solution with stable pricing.

Payment Options

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Stax offers solutions ranging from virtual terminals that utilize the devices you already have, to complete point-of-sale systems, and everything in between.

All plans include an incomparable range of features, like:

• Digital invoicing
• Text2Pay mobile payments
• Shareable payment links
• Scheduled payments
• One-click pre-built shopping carts
• Full catalog and inventory management
• Secure storage for customer information
• Contactless payments
• Integrations with PayPal, Venmo, buy now pay later services

Stax supports a decent range of compatible hardware, including the Dejavoo QD for chip, swipe, and contactless payments, Clover products like the Flex, Mini, Station Solo, and Station Duo, and a basic mobile card reader for phones or tablets.

The list of possibilities could go on for quite some time. But the gist is that Stax allows you to accept virtually every type of payment imaginable.

Regardless of how your customers shop and prefer to pay, you’ll be able to accept every payment without hassle.

When it comes to accessing your money, most Stax merchants see funds in their bank accounts within a few days. However, you can pay extra for next-day or even same-day funding if speed is crucial for cash flow.

Ecommerce Functionality

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You don’t need a full-blown ecommerce platform to start selling online—Stax makes it easy to open up an online storefront attached to your existing website. In fact, you can add Stax lightboxes to any website in just a few clicks with no technical expertise required.

Pre-built templates even give you control over the look, feel and design of your checkout experience without needing a developer.

But developers have plenty of customization options as well.

These easy one-click lightboxes empower you to quickly turn your site into an ecommerce engine, sell directly from social media platforms, and drive sales through sharable links without spending extra for ecommerce features elsewhere.

Integrations with major commerce platforms like Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and more allow Stax to seamlessly connect with your current online store, too.

So, there’s no need to overhaul your existing setup if you already have one. However, Stax doesn’t just handle traditional ecommerce transactions.

You can use the system to create, send, and track invoices—including a full automated reminder solution—and handle recurring payments on a set schedule.

The unified platform delivers centralized management for the whole operation. Inventory, sales, customer details—everything flows together in one dashboard. Even if you sell products online and in-person, Stax centralizes it all.

For SaaS businesses, Stax Connect takes things to the next level. This unique tech stack introduces integrated payments within your SaaS platform. With it, you can white label the entire payment portal for your customers or embed it in your own environment through API. It also supports ACH payments, tokenization, recurring billing, split payments, integrated surcharging, digital invoices, and more.

On top of that, you’ll get full concierge-level customer service. Stax claims they’ll go to great lengths to support its SaaS customers, even flying or driving to you directly to make sure you have everything you need.

Customer Support

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With a near-perfect customer satisfaction rating of 95% and an impressive 98% customer retention rate, it’s clear that Stax cares deeply about the customer experience.

The moment you become a Stax customer, you gain an entire team of dedicated experts who are ready and eager to assist you. This full-service support ranges from getting started and strategizing to seamlessly connecting everything together. The Stax squad has your back when it comes to troubleshooting issues, navigating chargebacks, and implementing new payment methods.

You can easily contact Stax’s stellar support team through multiple convenient channels – live chat right in your dashboard, ticket, email, or good ol’ fashioned phone. Stax also regularly updates its expansive knowledgebase, so you’ll always have a wealth of information at your fingertips.

If you opt for Stax’s enterprise or SaaS models, you can expect an even higher tier of white-glove service.

The bottom line? Stax offers best-in-class customer support through a variety of channels. Its team of dedicated experts is ready to help you every step of the way, ensuring you never have to figure out anything on your own.

Analytics

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Stax stands out from other merchant services for its robust yet intuitive reporting. From a high level, you can view key metrics like gross sales, net sales, refunds, and average order value.

You’ll also be able to dig deeper into the numbers you care about, including unpaid invoices, new vs returning buyers, disputes, and even heatmaps to help you understand how your customers behave before they buy.

Stax presents everything on a clean dashboard with graphical visuals that make trends easy to spot. And you don’t need a degree in business data to understand what you’re looking at.

The analytics don’t stop there—there are also pre-built reports that you can run with just a few clicks. These include a weekly summary, users report, sales by category or payment type, top selling items, company overview, and other essentials. However, you can also create your own custom reports just as easily.

You’ll have no problem understanding the lifetime value of a customer, slicing and dicing your data, analyzing peak days and times, or identifying trends. You can even integrate with QuickBooks to optimize your bookkeeping processes.

Beyond sales data, inventory management is robust as well. You can monitor stock levels across multiple locations and sales channels in one centralized hub.

And with the Stax mobile app, your key metrics are always at your fingertips no matter where you are. For any business that relies on data-driven decisions, Stax provides all the analytics and reporting capabilities you need.

Ease of Use

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Getting started with Stax is straightforward. You can start by filling out a brief application to open your account, including a few questions about your business needs so Stax can customize your setup. From there, you’ll have to wait for approval.

But you can poke around your new account right away to explore features and start strategizing. If you’d rather learn more before applying, you can schedule a demo, instead.

At first, the sheer number of built-in features will likely feel overwhelming. After all, Stax is a full-fledged business management solution. While it’s great that every plan includes every feature, it’s a lot to digest at once.

While it may take some time to understand it all, it’s worth the learning curve.

However, it’s tempting to go overboard configuring everything under the sun. But keep in mind that more complexity doesn’t necessarily mean better.

We recommend starting simple with the payment methods you absolutely need to simplify your initial configuration.

Once you’ve set everything, Stax’s dashboard is surprisingly easy to navigate thanks to its logical structure. With a bit of exploration, you’ll quickly learn your way around.

Before you know it, Stax will feel like second nature.

Final Thoughts

If you don’t want to mess with connecting multiple tools and working with various third-parties, Stax’s all-in-one business management solution is the way to go. From SaaS implementations to simple mobile payment processing or even hardware-free transactions, its unparalleled feature set is one of the most robust we’ve seen.