Welcome to part 7 of our 12 part series – “Tell Me the Best Merchant Solution for My Business.” In this chapter of our services we will discuss the following questions: “What mobile payment solutions should I take? Do I need a mobile payment solution?”
What is a mobile payment solution?
A mobile payment solution give you the ability to accept credit cards no matter where you are so as long as you can obtain a cellular signal. Mobile payment solutions are most often used by companies that accept credit cards in the field or in non-traditional store locations. Yet, they are also used by companies like Apple inside the Apple store because of the coolness and efficiency of these type of payment solutions.
Do I need a mobile payment solution?
If you are accepting payments in-person, yet out in the field then you must obtain a mobile payment solution. Examples of companies that should accept credit cards in the field are pizza delivery, plumbers, window replacement, home improvement, landscapers, taxi-drivers, farmer’s market stands. Yet, Unless your business is a doctor’s office or a retail location where 100% of our customers come to you in a traditional location it is a good idea to have a mobile payment solution. This is because if you can accept credit cards in person with the plastic card being swiped through a terminal you can save as much as 40% in credit card processing fess. Swiped transactions cost less to run per transaction than manually keyed in transactions. This is because there is less risk of credit card fraud for a card in hand transaction and there is also a lower risk of an unsatisfied customer who wants to run a charge back. The net result is that card issuing companies like Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover charge less to run a transaction that is swiped through a terminal and companies like Choice Merchant Services then pass that savings onto you.
What mobile payment solution should I use?
We recommend Phone Swipe. To take some excerpts from previous posts we made about Phone Swipe:
If you want to accept payments anywhere your best solution is Phone Swipe. Phone Swipe is the lowest cost mobile payment solution on the market. It allows you to simply plug a free phone adapter into your smart phone and then accept credit cards anywhere in the world that your mobile carrier is connected. This allows your customers to quickly pay out on the spot as you pull out your small smart phone and swipe their credit card through the several inch reader that you plug into it.
There is another benefit to Phone Swipe. When you use it, you will save a lot of money in credit card processing costs. That is because instead of a 4% of transaction fee to accept a payment via a keyed in transaction, you will pay just 2.69% per swiped transaction. Imagine getting to keep 1.31% of your total company revenue as profit. That is what Phone Swipe does for you.
Competitors of Phone Swipe such as Square charge more money and they offer less robust customer-service. There are also other mobile payment solutions you could get such as the Verifone VX670 and Way Systems yet they are big and bulky by today’s standards. You can also use Dial Pay to accept credit cards from any cell phone by keying in the credit card information – yet this system will raise your credit card processing costs by as much as 40% since all transactions that it would process are keyed in as opposed to swipe transactions.
Keep on reading. Our next chapter of this 12 part merchant service series will be part 8, “How secure is my customers’ data, including their credit card information? Is the solution you are providing me PCI complaint?”
