Saturday, October 27, 2007

Merchant Services

If your salon takes credit cards (and don't we all) it's important to pay attention to credit card processing fees. If you take a look at your monthly statement you'll see that there are about a million different rates. You pay one rate for a debit card, another for a regular credit card, another for an affinity (rewards) credit card and the list goes on. You pay more if the card number is manually entered than if it is swiped. There are per transaction fees and % fees.

If you're happy with the service your credit card processor provides, you should at least contact them once a year for a rate review. Every time I do that I get a rate decrease.

If you're in the market for a new processor there are a couple things to beware of:
  1. Know whether your old equipment will work (and whether you own it or are renting it). The equipment is expensive!
  2. Make sure the processor you go with is reputable and you know when they will fund. My vendor puts the money in my bank account next day. Some may take two days or more. I've heard of salons getting into serious cash flow problems because their credit card transactions had not funded yet.

3 comments:

  1. You are 100% correct. I have uses a few different card processor in each of my three salons and ended up switching each time to a new card processor because they offered me a lower rate. However, although the rate was lower on the contract after an analysis of my statements was done by a company I hired I was paying soooo much more because of the other feed they don't ell you about. I must say if you are looking for an honest processor contact www.kaizenpayments.com. They even set me up to accept checks at a quarter of the price of accepting credit cards. I used to not take checks because of NSF. Now the checks are guaranteed and I get mu $$$ the next day. Check them out I did and saved me huge. They are not your typical card processor. Good luck Snip Snip!

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  2. You should also look for merchant services credit card processing that is catered to your business; like there are special companies out there specifically for financing restaurants. I would look for a company that specializes in merchant accounts for small businesses, because generally, unless you're franchised, a salon would qualify as a small business. you would pay processing fees and have equipment that is catered to your needs and not the needs of some big corporation that does millions of dollars of processing a month.

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  3. Nice blog! Very interesting and informative post….Thank's for sharing such a nice information….Keep it up!!!

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