Contactless payment is quick and simple for customers and cashiers alike. By implementing contactless payments, business owners can welcome in a new era of convenience. Both near-field communication cards and mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, allow customers to pay in a more streamlined manner.
Why Add Contactless Payments?
The ease and simplicity of contactless payments is tough to beat. Reducing transaction times and improving the customer’s overall experience within your store is invaluable and contactless payments allow you to do just that.
Contactless payments are the epitome of safe, fast, and easy transactions, and they have relatively low fraud rates which helps you, the business owner, mitigate risk. Also, the reduced cost of cash handling lets you take advantage of cost reduction.
There are many environments where the speed of the transaction is a major factor in shaping a customer’s experience, such as in retail stores. By implementing contactless payments, businesses can streamline the customer experience and reap a variety of other rewards.
How to Add Contactless Payments
Accepting contactless payments in your store is going to mean an upgrade of hardware. All contactless payments work using near-field communication (NFC). This tech allows payment information to be encrypted before being sent via radio waves to the relevant terminals. For this to happen, your business will need hardware compatible with NFC.
It’s likely that you’ll be able to adapt your current card readers with a new plug-in that facilitates NFC. Many merchant services will have contactless readers available. If not, they should help you source third-party hardware that will integrate seamlessly with your current card-reader system.
If these options aren’t right for you, you may opt for a fully upgraded point of sales terminal. While this is the most expensive option in relation to introducing contactless payments, a fully integrated system is likely to present the best user experience and potential for future upgrades.
The Downsides of Accepting Contactless Payments
Other than the initial investment in hardware, there aren’t really any downsides that are associated exclusively with accepting contactless payments. The hardware costs may be off-putting, but the long-term returns are more than worth it. As long as your business ensures that staff are adequately trained to use any new hardware, these systems are relatively problem-free. It’s fair to say that adopting contactless payments is likely to be the beginning of making transactions safer, faster, and more convenient for retail employees, business owners, and customers.
