Two Important Questions To Answer In Order To Get An Efficient Payment Solution For Your Business

Many people go into the entrepreneurship of a retail business because they are passionate about meeting a market need in their immediate environment. Sometimes, the location of the big chains is too far away that you can’t just decide to run market errands on a whim without proper planning. Hence, you might decide to start a retail business in order to make it easier for people to access and buy the goods they need.

However, when you get into the thick of managing the business, you discover that entrepreneurship can be stressful. One of the most stressful aspects of running a retail business is the complexities involved in sorting out payment issues. Interestingly, you’ll find it much easier to keep your business afloat if you understand payments because getting payments in full and on time is germane to the cash flow of your business. Below are two questions you must answer in order to get the payment part of your business in order.

What kinds of payments will you accept?

The simplest way to avoid payment headaches is to determine the kind of payments you want to accept in your business. You’ll think that accepting payments is easy until someone shows up to buy a thousand dollars worth of goods and then start asking if you accept Bitcoin payments. Maybe asking for Bitcoin payments is somewhat over the top, but you’ll lose money if people ask to pay electronically and you only accept cash in your store. Of course, the generally accepted forms of payment are cash, check and credit card.

If your business has an online presence, you may also want to think about online payment solutions. In 2016, card transactions outpaced payments in check and cash, and the trend is likely to continue. Cash is liquid, it provides a ready source of cash flow, and it costs practically nothing in terms of transaction times and fees. Cards are more secure because you can’t be robbed at gun point, you have proof of transactions in the event of a dispute, but you’ll need to pay some merchant fees.

How would you accept the payments?

After you have weighed the pros and cons of different payments methods and you have decided on kind of payments you want to accept; you’ll need to make efforts to create the system for getting paid. To begin with, you’ll need to figure out the kind of point of sale technology you want for accepting credit and debit card payments.

For instance, Shopkeep pos system is is more or less a cash register on an iPad, which provides retailers with a fully-digital payment processing with unparallel speed, efficient operations, and at a low cost. Some other POS systems are simple card readers that may read magnetic stripe cards without being enabled to read EMV cards.

You may also want to consider merchant accounts for online payment services such as PayPal and Square. An online payment solution is particularly important if you have an online presence for making sales via social media or if you have integrated ecommerce solutions into your website. However, you need to examine the pros and` cons of different payment systems so that you can be sure a solution that makes it easy for you to get paid.