If you want the long and short of it: All the new Mastercard rules really do is ensure transparency in offerings like free trials. For merchants whose business practices are one hundred percent transparent and up-front, the changes probably aren’t going to affect your business at all. But there is a tendency for merchants to...
In the retail business, for more companies than not, the holiday season is a very busy time of year. The period stretching from Thanksgiving to Christmas accounts for about eleven percent of the average retailer’s annual earnings, while making up less than eleven percent of that retailer’s business hours for the year. And that eleven...
The point of sale eco-system is a strange beast. There is constant innovation. Every day they are developing new ways to pay, and every day, the rollout is encumbered by any number of things. It could be legislation and regulation that wasn’t ready to adapt to this new technology and it needs to be corrected...
Limited Acceptance: managing debit-only card acceptance for businesses with specific compliance restrictions. Certain industries, such as collection agencies, consumer lending, auto finance, and others, are subject to accept debit cards only. For debit-related payments, the card brands mandate the debt to be paid without accruing more debt, such as using a credit card. Limited Acceptance...
Visa’s Debt Repayment Program allows qualified lenders to benefit from lower interchange. We don’t really think of credit cards as a lending program, but that’s what a credit card is. You buy something by taking a little money from a third party, and then a month later, you pay it back with interest. That’s...
What is a credit card company but a lender? We don’t really think of them that way, we think of a credit card account as something like a debit account, just one that we pay later, after we’ve made our purchases. Or like delayed spending, we pay an extra little fee so that we don’t...
Signing for credit card purchase seems like something from an earlier time. Your transaction is all digital, but it’s not complete until they hand you a little scrap of paper for you to write your name on like a contract? It feels a bit odd that this is still how we’re doing things in the...
Every business is built around the point of sale. Some businesses approach it in a different way than others. There are salespeople who will use pressure tactics to make a sale as quickly as possible. There are convenience stores that focus on impulse buys. There are business models that are more about the slow burn,...
Is there any such thing as a guaranteed merchant account? Like any good question, the short answer is “It depends.” A question worth asking, an important question, is always going to be a little more complicated than something that you can answer with a yes or no. If you ask “Who should I vote for...
Collection agencies are one of those industries that, well, let’s just say people have a strong reaction when you tell them that that’s the line of work you’re in. Ironically, the regulations that collection agencies abide by mean that they actually make life a lot easier for people who owe money. Collection agencies have a...
