These days, credit cards are practically ubiquitous – found just about everywhere. What does that mean to you? If you’re not accepting them, you’re probably operating at a significant disadvantage compared to your competition. According to the NASDAQ, more than half of all consumers use more than three card based payment methods including debit and credit cards.
The Benefits
According to Business Link, by accepting credit cards, you’ll open up your business to everyone who comes into your store- rather than just the roughly 40 percent who only carry cash.
Customers rarely carry more in cash than they have in their bank accounts, and they also have lines of credit open to them which expand the size of their spending power. That means you’ll be able to make much larger sales by accepting credit cards. People are often more motivated to make impulse buys using credit cards since they can use their repayment history to improve their credit.
Credit cards are more convenient than cash and are safer for the customer than debit. This is because if something goes wrong with the payment, customers do not lose their own money – the credit card company does. In addition to more access to different types and larger ticket sales, you can take comfort knowing that your credit card customers have been vetted for their ability to pay by their banking institution.
There are many tools available that make credit card processing even more advantageous. These include SMART POS systems, or “point of sale” systems. These speed transactions and gather useful information you can use to fine-tune your marketing efforts later on. Some great examples of SMART POS systems are Clover Station, Clover Mini, Clover Mobile and the Clover Flex.
These may sound like small advantages at first, but keep in mind that there are enormous, global industries that owe their existence to these advantages. So you would be ill-advised to ignore them.
The Disadvantages
With every advancement comes certain complexities that you must cope with. If you take credit cards, you will pay regular fees to your credit card processing service and you may have to buy or rent the equipment necessary to complete transactions. Also, you don’t get paid right away, but have to wait for payments to process through the system and be deposited into your business account. Of course, if the advantages didn’t far outweigh the disadvantages, it would be a mystery why so many highly successful multinational corporations take most of their payments via credit cards.
Overall, the power and convenience of credit cards far outweigh their drawbacks – and the evidence is all around you.