If you’re a small-scale business owner, it’s crucial to put the importance of payment processing first, regardless of whether you run a physical store or an online store. Processing payments is the heartbeat for any business, as it allows you to accept payment from your customers and keep sales flowing into.
To ensure that your customers enjoy an enjoyable and safe shopping experience, it’s essential to adhere to a set of best guidelines. If you take steps to secure your customers’ personal information and making sure you have payment processing that are secure and up-to date, system is up-to-date and reliable, you’ll be able to ensure a satisfying shopping experience that increases customers’ loyalty and increases sales. Consider these suggestions to move your small-scale enterprise to the next stage and be more successful.
Find the Perfect Payment Processor
Choosing the right payment processing that permits you to accept online payment processing and in-store is crucial for small businesses to run. The features, security, and customer support you need for small-scale business payments originate from your processor.
You may work with multiple payment processing. Each is accountable for a particular element of your payment workflow. It’s generally more efficient to use a full-service processor that can support various payment options, such as credit cards, debit cards, ACH payments as well as gift cards. There’s a chance that you’ll encounter less interoperability issues, and if you have problems with your payment processing, you’ll only need to contact only one support representative and not a variety of.
In addition, you should ensure that your processor is able to provide Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, which is required by every business that uses credit or debit cards. PCI compliance means that you’re up-to-date on best practices for protecting your customers and business from committing fraud. The payment processing you choose to use should provide additional features such as point-to-point encryption (P2PE) as well as hosted payment pages and tokenization.
Make Use of Other Security Features
While choosing a PCI compliant Payment Processing can reduce the risk of fraud, it’s your obligation as a small company to secure any information from customers that is transferred to your system. Here are some additional security system steps you can take to protect your company and your customers:
- Address Verification Services (AVS): AVS confirms that a client’s billing address matches that associated with the account of the cardholder. This procedure helps determine whether the transaction on a credit card should be approved or denied.
- Card verification value (CVV) code: CVV codes are three-to-four-digit numbers found on the back of many credit and debit cards. They are used to confirm that the customer can physically access their card that they’re using to buy items and services.
- Two-factor authentication: Two-factor authentication adds an additional security layer that goes beyond the user name and password. Typically, a customer or employee is required to provide the security code or answer to a security-related question when they log into their account using your username and password. While these extra steps could make it more time-consuming to complete the log-in and checkout procedure, they also aid in protecting your employees and customers from hackers who can exploit compromised and stolen passwords.
Make Clear the Policy on Refunds
Certain businesses might include their refund policy on the terms of their conditions and policies, which can make it difficult for customers to locate. If you keep your refund policy secret the business could be faced with chargebacks. A chargeback is a compulsion refund of funds to a client’s card account following a dispute over an account at their banks.
If you are a business owner trying to dispute a chargeback through emails, calls and paper work is lengthy. If your company accumulates enough chargebacks, your processor may decide to lower your level of service and charge you more processing fees for credit cards.
An alternative is to create the policy of refunds that is easy to comprehend and is in the view of employees and customers. It’s good to include your policy on receipts to ensure that customers are able to quickly reference it. If you operate a brick-and-mortar establishment, think about putting an announcement that outlines the policy at the cash counter. Although you may notice the number of refunds increase, this method is less risky and more efficient than handling chargebacks. Additionally, refunds enable you to solicit feedback from customers so that you can enhance your services or products.
Make Sure you are Promoting Your Payment Options
After you’ve establish your business in order to accept payment processing, inform your customers know the payment options you will accept. For brick and mortar businesses, you can place credit card logos on the front of your store and on the cash drawer. When your point of sale (POS) equipment is outfitted with integrated NFC technology, you must also add logos for contactless payments.
If you’re an online-based business you should add all credit logos in your shopping cart and also hyperlinks to sites like and Venmo. The greater the number of payment choices you can offer in your arsenal, the more likely to make a sale and maintain customers.
Automate Invoices
Manual invoices can consume a considerable amount of time away from your business. They need you to enter manually details about the customer, calculate sale information, keep track of and monitor invoicing pending and make sure you follow up on invoice reminders for payment and past due invoices. With invoice software it is possible to automate the process of invoices to reduce time and be paid more quickly. A lot of services let you:
- Automatically import customer details from your template invoice.
- Include a button on invoices to allow your customers to pay you online directly using the payment processing method of their preference
- Monitor invoices and get alerts delivered to your mobile phone after they’ve been paid
- Send reminders for payments to your customers
- Create recurring invoices according to the basis of a particular date
Connect your Payment Using Accounting Software
As well as automating the process of invoices you could also link your payment processing data to an accounting system. Automating this process will help to organize your bookkeeping and reduce mistakes through manual data entry. In addition, it reduces the number of days you have outstanding sales (DSO) and increase your compliance and auditing positions.
To allow your small-scale business to develop and grow it is essential to ensure that your payment processing system is designed to succeed. This involves using the correct software, making use of different payment options, taking advantage of the security tools, as well as creating the right refund policy. Your business will be paid quicker and more efficient, and your clients are likely to return for more business.
