For anyone who has ever worked in retail – even an online retailer -- they have no doubt heard the phrase: “The customer is always right.” That is a short way of saying that having one’s own store tacitly says you are interested in delivering goods and services.
However, that phrase can be turned a couple of different ways that may bring the heart and soul of e-retailing into sharp relief and that is no one ever succeeded in business if they ignored what their customers were asking for. And that means services as well as merchandise.
Consider this – you have an Internet teddy bear store and you can’t keep the blue ones in stock before they are all sold out. At the other end of the spectrum are the purple ones which have not sold since day one. While this example is rather elementary it would only make sense that you would do everything possible to stock blue, while returning to the purple to the manufacturer.
What you wouldn’t do one day is discontinue the blue line, stock only the purple line and expect people to remain loyal customers. Because when we are in our consumer mode we do not want to be preached at – we want what we want, when we want it, the way we want it and we want a darn good price to boot!
The same can be said of credit card processing services online. While there was a time that people may have hoped some of their favorite shopping sites had merchant services they were accommodating when they didn’t. They even thought that being able to accept credit cards was something that small online mom-and-pop businesses couldn’t handle.
But over time consumers got more and more used to being able to use their credit cards when they shopped online, and they were no long willing to be so accommodating. They started to expect to at very least being given the option to pay by credit card.
While this was going on competition among credit card processing companies was heating up and they were making inroads with those smaller online entities that used to not be on their radar. And once Small Business A added merchant account, the others quickly followed.
Suddenly those small business consumers used to think couldn’t handle credit card now offered the option and the expectation was raised that any ongoing online retailer would have an ecommerce merchant account.
The net result of all these machinations is that now over 80 percent of all goods and services procured online are paid for using as credit card, and that number is expected to increase.
So if you e-business does not accept payments online you are, in effect, telling a substantial number of customers that their business does not matter to you. And is that really the message that you want to send out? Because there is plenty of competition that wants their business and takes credit cards.
Take the time to add credit card merchant services. Or to turn a phrase: “Give them what they want.”
Jim Osterman is a Web content developer with Charge.com, a leader in the
credit card processing industry, offering progressive
merchant services solutions.
