Which Mobile Payment Service Is Best for Your Business?
Small businesses come in all shapes and sizes and setup in all kinds of locations. If you don’t have a physical location for your business, it’s important to be able to take mobile payments. With the advances in technology, small businesses can now accept payments over all kinds of devices like tablets, cell phones, etc. making it extremely easy to sell your products from pretty much anywhere you have cell service or an internet connection. In an article for Inc.com, “Which Mobile Payment Service Is Best for Your Business?”, Maeghan Ouimet compares six top contenders in the industry giving you information on each so that you can make the decision on which would be suit your business’s needs. In this post we will look at a couple of the top contenders.
Square
Square is a free card reader that allows you to accept payments on a mobile device. Businesses that have a physical location can plug the card reader into an iPad and use the Square’s register app for a setup that’s similar to a traditional register. Square is easy to set up seeing as it is just a software download and it offers back-end analytics and customizable royalty programs. You’ll need an iPad to use Square as a register; the card reader works with iOS and Android devices. There are no monthly fees or contracts, however, Square charges a 2.75% swipe fee which is slightly higher than other competitors.
NCR Silver
NCR Silver is a point-of-sale software platform that connects to iPhones and iPads and is the priciest of the bunch. NCR Silver is more appropriate for businesses that have multiple locations and a large salesforce because it is cloud-based. Its analytics can show you real-time sales data across all your stores. You get targeted marketing tools, such as the ability to send out daily deal emails to customers. However, merchants must have a Wi-Fi connection for the cloud-based system to work. A monthly subscription costs $79 plus the cost of hardware ($699 for the card reader, cash drawer, and receipt printer and $499 for an optional barcode scanner).
GoPago
GoPago is one of the newest players in the mobile payment industry. They have an interesting approach in that they give their whole system (tablet, credit card reader, receipt printer, etc.) away for free. GoPago was designed with restaurants in mind: Customers can use the smartphone app to place and pay for orders without standing in line. GoPago provides 24/7 support as well as analytics. The company says the system comes ready to use. GoPago’s transaction fee is 2.85% per card swipe plus an additional 5% transaction fee if customers order ahead using the app. These are three of the six contenders mentioned in the article linked above. If you want to check out the others, click on the link. According to the Wall Street Journal, mobile payments are expected to quadruple to over $600 billion by the year 2016, showing small business owners the importance of being able to accept them. Mobile payments aren’t something businesses can avoid for much longer, might as well read up now.
