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Mobile Business, Mobile Payments
These days, you can do just about anything on a smartphone: send an invoice, read a proposal or locate vendors. Now your business can even accept payment.
This technology is especially useful for business owners whose businesses are mobile in nature, from a hot dog vendor to a Mary Kay representative, said Ramon Ray, founder of SmallBizTechnology.com, a media company that educates small businesses on using technology to expand. Accepting payment via smartphone speeds up the process because there’s no paperwork and, in some cases, no need to record the payee’s credit card or contact information. For businesses that traditionally accept cash only, sales may even go up because of the added convenience.
If you’re concerned about security or reliability, as many new users are, Ray suggests that small businesses use mobile payment solutions that aren’t brand-new to the market. For peace of mind, you may want to test the application with a handful of loyal customers.
There are several types of mobile payment solutions, depending on what kind of phones you and your customers have. Payments between two smartphones may be transmitted through a downloadable application (Ray prefers PayPal), or over the Web with no download. If you have a smartphone but your customer doesn’t, use a credit card reader that attaches to your phone to process payments immediately (try Square or ROAMpay) or take a customer’s credit card number using a downloadable application (like Intuit’s GoPayment), which also processes payment immediately.
Don’t have a smartphone but still interested in accepting mobile payment? If you and your customer have standard cell phones, a customer can text the payment amount to a vendor company like Obopay or Venmo, which completes the transaction. Or you can record a customer’s credit card number via a mobile, cordless credit card reader like ProPay, and process the payment when you return to a computer.
Signing up for credit card processing services—or in the case of smartphone-to- smartphone transactions, downloading the app to your phone—is usually free. But, every time a customer pays you, the processing service will take a cut, just like a traditional credit card processing service. There may be an additional one-time fee for a card reader that attaches to your phone.
When deciphering your options, ask for recommendations from fellow small
business owners and current customers. You may find that many of your customers are already loyal to a particular solution they’ve used. “The key is to make [payment] easier for your customers,” said Ray.