Whether your business is an eCommerce site or a brick and mortar store, one thing you are surely dealing with is the high cost of payment processors. Accepting credit cards is great for your customer’s convenience, but is taking a big chunk of your revenue.
It’s natural to expect to pay some fees for a company to process your payments. After all, they are in business to make money, too. The problem is that these fees go up all the time. They take a fixed fee monthly to use their service. Then another fee for sending the batch to the bank at the end of the day and then a percentage of every sale that uses their processor. This really adds up for a small business.
Luckily, there are alternatives available thanks to some major advances with the internet. There wasn’t always so much competition for these credit card processors and they could charge what they wanted. Now there are options so you should definitely be looking into the alternatives.
Cryptocurrency
With so many people using Bitcoin more and more, it is becoming a mainstream way to pay for goods and services. Finding the easiest way to buy Bitcoin for most people is not a problem so they always have a bit in a wallet to use for purchases.
It is far easier, more secure, and cheap to accept Bitcoin payments over a credit card processor. Security is one of the biggest reasons that people like to use it to pay. The blockchain is immutable so it is far harder for somebody to hack in and steal sensitive information.
Many stores end up getting hacked and their customer’s credit card information is compromised. This is one less thing for you to worry about.
Transactions are fast and it costs a literal fraction of what the credit card processors charge.
Smartphone payments
If you have a brick and mortar location and accept POS payments, then you are leaving money on the table if you are not allowing your customers to pay with their mobile phone.
You’ll need a wireless terminal as people literally tap their phones onto the face to initiate the payment process. This is an expense that will pay for itself as the fees are minimal with apps like ApplePay and others.
The way it works is that people top up their accounts on their app of choice by linking it to their bank. Then, the app is what makes the payment to the processor. It essentially cuts out a few middlemen making it much cheaper to process.
It’s important to understand your demographic before settling on the apps you want to accept. There are a lot of options so choose the ones that your target market is most likely to use. ApplePay is the most popular, but there are others out there.
Online payments
If you are an owner of an eCommerce store, then your options are even better as online payments are much easier and cheaper. For instance, you can accept Paypal and receive benefits beyond the ease of use and low fees. With many processors like Paypal, they offer mediation when there is a dispute overpayment.
