Here’s Why Cash Is Still Important For Small Businesses

Posted By Merchant365 ATM Placement / ATM News / atm, cash, cash benefits / No Comments

In this age of high-tech payment methods, most businesses will happily accept a good old dollar bill. Your small business should encourage customers to use cash. It is a simple payment that is cheaper and more secure than credit and debit cards. Your business and your customers both benefit when you work with paper money.

According to data from Intuit, around 55 percent of small businesses don’t accept credit cards. Another survey found that 72 percent of business owners don’t prefer credit card payments, and there are many reasons for this. Paying with plastic makes things more complicated for shopkeepers. It requires more bookkeeping, and you have to wait a few days for your money. Plastic also requires slow machines, which have gotten even slower since banks introduced the new chip-enabled cards.

Paper money is also more secure. Yes, you can lose it, but it can’t get hacked like a credit card system. You don’t want to end up like Home Depot, a company that lost $10 billion thanks to criminals hacking into their transactions data in 2014. Credit card machines are also vulnerable to crashes. This is a lesson that shopkeepers in the UK learned the hard way on Valentine’s Day in 2015. On that day, businesses lost thousands of sales because card systems went down.

Accepting card payments also costs your small business money. When your customers pay you with dollar bills, you don’t owe any fees to a third party. Compare that with the cut from each sale that credit card companies take. These fees average around 2% for MasterCard, Visa, and Discover. American Express takes an average of 3%. All cards charge a flat 20 to 30 cent fee per transaction on top of these percentages.

Your customers also benefit when you encourage cash payments. A study by Allpoint found that 49% of consumers said they paid with dollar bills last year, while 43% said they used cards. Most of your potential customers simply prefer paper over plastic, but some don’t have a choice. When your business is dollar bill friendly, consumers without traditional bank accounts can buy your goods and services.

Putting an ATM in your small business is a good way to encourage your customers to pay with paper. At Merchant365, we have placed many money machines in businesses across Western Canada. Our ATMs are reliable and we offer 24/7 technical support to our clients. Contact us today for more information about how an ATM from Merchant365 can help your business gain all the benefits of cash.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

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