Give Your Customers Different Options at the Checkout Counter

Watching a customer walk away from a full shopping cart at the checkout because you don’t offer the payment method that they prefer is incredibly frustrating for you and your customers. For customers, it’s annoying to spend time and effort choosing products and finding an outdated, lumbering, slow payment system at the checkout counter. And, for you as the business owner, you have lost a sale and all the income that would have come with it, and to add insult to injury, you’ve also got to restock your shelves.

A great driver of purchasing decisions is social media. Recent studies conducted by Business Insider Intelligence show that social media referrals are on the upswing. Social media platforms hold an immense amount of information about your customers and use cutting-edge data analytics tools to make recommendations based on history, frequency, geography and personal tastes.

The flip side is that when information about non-friendly payment options provided by a business are shared, this can spread like wildfire, and before you know it, you could be saddled with the reputation of having clunky, obsolete payment systems.

Range Of Payment Options

While setting up a new business or upgrading an established one, ensure that you keep your customer firmly in mind. Analyze the typical target customer, observe the visitors and shoppers who frequent your website or brick-n-mortar store. Based on these aspects, you can provide a wider spectrum of options.

• Credit cards: They’re one of the most popular payment options across geographies. Businesses can widen their customer base to include a bigger pool. Surveys show that, on average, credit card users are in the higher income brackets. These cards are used especially frequently for big ticket purchases, emergencies, travel, fine dining, and gifting.
• Debit cards: These cards deduct the transaction amount directly from the customer’s bank account. They may have daily purchase limits and are most often used for everyday purchases like groceries, gas, regular payments like fees, and utilities.
• EVM Chip Cards: They are part of the Europay-MasterCard-Visa global standard used by nearly 80 countries and are an advanced tech form of credit card. They reduce fraud risk because they’re hard to counterfeit.
• Contactless Near-Field-Communication: Along with digital wallets, these options are emerging as newer products. They enable communication between smartphones and chip cards within certain geographical limits. They include tap-to-pay options. Transactions are extremely fast and are a boon for business-owners/customers during peak seasons like Christmas or Black Friday.
• Netbanking: This is the preferred option for most e-commerce websites while paying for goods and services.
• Portable POS (Point of Sale) : On-the-go payment systems are used when retailers want to swiftly complete transactions without being entangled in tech that requires wires, stationery etc. They’re great for events and exhibitions, pop-up shops, smaller retailers and businesses that don’t want a clearly demarcated payment area or checkout counter.
• Scan-n-Go: The “just-walk-out” technology integrates the inventory with the shopping cart and items are charged to a particular account/card etc with receipts sent to the customer.

Benefits for Your Business

• Keeps your business modern, competitive and customer-friendly
• More options allow you to net a bigger range of customers
• You can free up your staff and complete transactions from anywhere

Traditional payment habits like checks or cash are so very yesterday. Today’s tech-savvy, well-informed customer wants and expects certain features to be in place when they decide to patronize your business.

For more information on how to give your customers different options at the checkout counter, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.