Regardless if you have an online presence, a bricks and mortar shop, or a combination of both, the customer experience, as they navigate through your offerings, needs to be aimed high. You want your customers to return because they enjoyed the experience.
On the top of customer experience complaints is payment methods. As illegal as it is, undeclared cash income happens; ask many small transaction owner operated businesses what their payment preference is and cash will be at the top of the list.
Conversely, in this day and age, ask a consumer their preferred payment method, and electronic transactions are the bee’s knees – carrying cash is an annoyance and only really useful if you want to score some dope or score a hooker.
So what the consumer prefers is a polar opposite to what a small business owner wants.
Cashless transaction systems like EFTPOS, BPAY, PAYPAL, iPAY, VISA, PAYPASS, etc offer consumer convenience, but there is a cost associated with using these systems. The costs might be at the infrastructure level, the system maintenance level, or at the associated security systems. Every provider of the different levels is not going to offer this as a charitable function or part of their social responsibility charter. These costs then need to be absorbed by the retailer or, as is most often the case, passed onto the consumer.
Non-cash payment systems have been around for a long time now. In fact, there is a virtual plethora of different ways of making a payment. Consumers will naturally gravitate to the system that they are most comfortable with. As a retailer, although you may love the folding stuff, you will need to offer as many different payment methods that are practically implementable. This may be largely dictated by your main financial institution, however, third party payment support services will exist that can integrate with your existing financial provider and with your POS system.
You could buck the system and insist on cash only. But unless you are the only supplier of what you have in the whole world, why would you entertain, even for a second, a reason for your customer to acquire the goods/services from elsewhere.
The customer is always right still has some relevance today, but more importantly, customer convenience has overtaken the old mantra.
Customer Convenience feeds into Customer Experience, and as we all know, businesses with high customer experience ratings (the Customer Experience Index (CXi)) will always be more successful than those that annoy or otherwise irritate their customers.
