Benefits of Accepting Credit Cards

Typically, small business owners initially focus on setting up the business, getting the team together, creating a unique product and marketing it. Once they feel they’ve taken care of what they think are the essentials, they begin to home in on issues like revenue generation and customer service.

A major factor in ensuring a smooth, comfortable and enjoyable customer experience is the payment process. If your customers find it difficult, long, drawn-out, or complicated to pay for their purchases, they’re going to move on. Whether you run a brick-and-mortar setup or an e-commerce enterprise, shopping-cart abandonment is a real and present danger.

A Federal Reserve Payments study conducted in 2016 reports that check payments have been steadily falling since 2012, while making payments with general purpose microchip-embedded cards has grown by 230% in the same period. Many millennials don’t possess checkbooks and are much more accustomed to paying for purchases online. Cash payments are also becoming less preferred by consumers.

Keeping these factors in mind, it’s important to stay in sync with customer preferences and behavior if you want your business to stay relevant, healthy, and competitive.

Accepting credit card payments can make a significant difference to your profitability and brand. If you haven’t begun the process yet, perhaps it’s about time you did.

Benefits of Accepting Credit Card Payments

• Join the club: Why get left out when almost every small, medium and large business has switched to card payment and other multiple ways of accepting payment? Customer-loyalty can be notoriously fickle. If you don’t provide ease, safety and reliability of payment, there are others who can and will. A customer who wants to pay with a credit card can find another business that will accomodate them if your business won’t.

• Boost your sales graph: Studies show that sales have the potential to increase by up to 500% or more if credit card payment facilities are introduced. Surveys by Intuit show that more than 80% of small companies that accept cards report better sales. This is because card payments today are quick and the whole process just takes a few minutes.

• Pull ‘em in: Consumer-behavior studies show that people tend to be less conservative in spending when they have card facilities. The act of paying by plastic seems much less stressful than handing over cold, hard cash. Impulse purchases are much more, gifting, tipping and extras get added on more easily when customers find that they can pay by card.

• Reach out: Cards are used not by the local population. Business travelers, vacationers, tourists, and people from different parts of the country, city or the world may drop in either at your brick-and-mortar store or your e-commerce website. Credit cards and debit cards allow these customers to safely and conveniently buy whatever you’re selling.

• Trust and faith: Displaying the card logo in-store or on your website gives that instant trust factor. People trust the card they have in their wallets and this effect spills over on to your business and brand, giving it more legitimacy and value.

• Cash-flow strategizing: Cash is inconvenient and unsafe to have around. Checks take time to clear and could bounce. Credit cards provide very quick funding into your bank account that you can plow back into your business.

For more information on the benefits of accepting credit cards, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.