Best Practices for Contactless Payments

Last Updated on February 20, 2024

Contactless payment is when someone scans their credit card near the credit card terminal, but they never swipe the card. While these were once very rare, now many credit cards have embedded RFID chips. One of the obvious benefits to installing contactless payment terminals is to help satisfy customers, but there are other benefits as well that may help your business make better money. These are some of the best practices when making your store ready to accept contactless payment.

 

Do Your Research

Before you begin accepting contactless payment, do some research on your demographic. If your demographic does not use contactless credit cards, then it may not be a requirement for you to continue doing effective business. At the same time, if they do commonly use this, then understand what cards are often most often will be best.

For example, if most people use Visa credit cards for this, and you get a system that can only accept American Express, then all you did was wasted money. This will keep you from making costly mistakes, and you will know if it is financially beneficial for you to have this type of payment system or not.

 

Plan and Benefit

Don’t start installing contactless credit card terminals randomly without having a plan. Even if this plan is simple, such as waiting until overnight to install the systems, writing down and having a plan is the best. Without a plan, you may forget a step or requirement for installing the terminals. Not only is this a good idea, but the SMA recommends it as well.

Aside from benefitting your customers, this will also benefit your business. Since this will give customers a new way to pay, you may get more customers. However, the bigger benefit is that contactless credit cards take less time to use. So in the time it would take 40 customers to swipe credit cards, 55 or 60 may be able to scan the card.

 

Accessible Installation

One important part of installing a contactless credit card terminal is making it accessible. If you have the terminal facing the employee, then there is no way for the customer to scan his or her credit card, removing any benefit of this system. Not only that, but the terminal should not be too high or too low. For height issues, the contactless terminal should be the same height as regular terminals.

Also, instead of having a knot of wires behind the register, make sure it can be easily accessed by service people so they can fix the terminal quickly, if needed. Otherwise, service people may spend hours just trying to get to the system before they are able to fix it.

 

All or None

According to the SMA’s guidelines, when you add contactless terminals, you should change all of the machines at once to accept contactless credit cards. While you do not need to follow the SMA guidelines, this is usually best.

You may think that just installing one system and seeing if customers like it make sense, and in some ways it does. However, if the system is popular, you may have an imbalanced amount of customers in one line, which can drastically slow down operations.

 

Training Your Employees

If none of your employees know how to accept contactless credit cards, then there is no benefit to having the terminal. So, before rolling out the system, make sure every employee knows how to accept payment.

Since contactless credit cards are similar to regular credit cards, this should be easy. You can take employees aside from several minutes or an hour (however long is needed) to train them during the workday, or you can schedule a small training seminar one or two hours before the store opens.

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About the Author

My name is Robert Evans and I am a co-founder of CheapestMerchantAccounts.com We launched this website in an effort to provide the world's best merchant account review website. We have done extensive research on each and every provider listed and are continually working to improve our website and rankings. Additionally we will be writing and publishing articles that we hope will allow our visitors a greater look into the credit card processing industry. These articles should give you a solid stance on which to negotiate your next merchant account.

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