Category: Business Tips

If there is one lesson the global COVID-19 pandemic taught business owners, it’s the importance of having access to the money needed to get through times of emergency. A strong emergency fund is the first line of defense, but whether the money is to ride out a storm, finance a new capital project, or anything […]

Accepting American Express cards hasn’t always been easy – especially for small business owners. When consumers think “credit card,” Visa and Mastercard are generally the two brands that come to mind first, because those two cards, along with Discover cards, are accepted by effectively every single merchant that offers credit card payments. For decades, American […]

Choosing a Payment Processor Takes More Than Comparing Rates When margins are tight, it becomes more important than ever for merchants to squeeze as much value as possible from their operations, including payment processing. The original version of this article was written in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when widespread closures and changes in […]

American Express Acceptance Has Changed American Express OptBlue has made accepting Amex much simpler for small and mid-sized businesses. Instead of managing American Express through a completely separate relationship, eligible merchants can accept Amex through the same payment provider that handles their other major card brands. That means fewer moving parts behind the scenes: one […]

Digital wallets are new payment solutions offered by a wide variety of operating system and device manufacturers that allow users to store an entire wallet’s worth of cards in digital format on their smartphones, tablets, and even watches. Apple Pay is the digital wallet that comes stock on all iPhones and all new MacBooks, making […]

With 2020 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start looking ahead to the new trends and technologies that will define the payments space in 2021. Industry news for January is still heavily impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and includes new resources for merchants around the country, a brand new cloud-based mobile POS, and […]

Mobile Payments Are Now Part of Everyday Commerce Mobile devices have become an ingrained and integral part of our daily lives. The original version of this article noted that more than 80% of U.S. adults owned smartphones. That number has continued to grow. According to Pew Research Center’s latest survey, 91% of U.S. adults now […]

COVID-19 has caused enormous hardships for small business owners across the vast majority of industries, but perhaps no sector has been hit harder than food service. The rapid spread of the virus has damaged the restaurant industry in two major ways; far-reaching regulatory restrictions and changes to consumer behavior.

Nobody likes waiting to access money they have rightfully earned. Yet, that’s the situation the vast majority of merchants are forced to deal with on every single sale they make due to the standard funding holds imposed by most payment processors. Those processors’ merchant accounts don’t give merchants access to the funds from their sales […]

2020 was an unprecedented year for brick and mortar merchants, as the global COVID-19 pandemic saw many businesses forced to close and strict guidelines put in place limiting in-store activities. In turn, consumers flocked online, boosting ecommerce sales by 45% year-over-year and accelerating ecommerce adoption by as much as five years. Consumer habits are like […]

A touch screen point-of-sale (POS) system is like a typical POS system, but the software operates on handheld devices and tablets, rather than traditional POS hardware. Touch screen POS systems are web-based and can synchronize in real time to a variety of other software solutions, enabling merchants to monitor their businesses from anywhere in the […]

Have you ever stamped a card in anticipation of a free coffee? Presented a swipe card to gain points towards your next gallon of gas? Signed up for a payment card offering a percentage of your purchase back? If so, you’re already very familiar with customer loyalty programs.  Loyalty programs represent a great way to […]

Apple Pay is Apple’s proprietary electronic payment solution, working hand-in-hand with Apple Wallet, the company’s card storage platform. Its userbase is growing extremely rapidly, and the system is well on its way to handling one out of every ten card payments by 2025. To use Apple Pay, users program their debit and credit card information […]

The global spread of COVID-19 threw the entire globe into chaos, and businesses all over the world suddenly found themselves operating under new, strict rules – if they were allowed to operate at all. That put an enormous strain on the entirety of retail, with few sectors emerging unscathed. But limited access to the businesses […]

There are few things more satisfying than checking your numbers after a strong day of sales. But what is far less satisfying is having to wait days – often half a week or more – to enjoy the fruits of those sales due to annoyingly long hold periods imposed by your merchant services provider. That’s […]

Merchant services providers have a huge role to play in the success of all companies accepting electronic payments, both online and in-store. But, whether you choose to partner with a third-party processor like PayPal or to open up your own personal merchant account through a company like BAMS, it’s important that you understand exactly what […]

Toast is a software company that provides restaurants with point-of-sale systems, as well as a host of other products covering ordering, management, and payment solutions. Toast’s flagship product is its Android-based cloud POS, which offers restauranteurs an easy-to-use, efficient software suite and simple, modular hardware. The success of that POS drove Toast’s value to over […]

Learn how to lower your credit card processing fees and save money.