Accepting online payments is the lifeblood of online businesses, without which no business can thrive. Therefore, it’s important to give your customers as many options as you can when it comes to choosing the mode of payment.
Moreover, the ability to accept online payments using an online payments gateway has unprecedented advantages over traditional modes of payments such as cheques and physical currency.
Let’s have a look at a few of the advantages of accepting online payments.
Saves time and effort
An online payment form on the website or sharing a payment link with the customer is a much faster option compared to traditional methods such as printing invoices, and posting them manually via post. Online payment options help in saving crucial time that can be spent on other productive aspects of your business that can help you scale rather than wasting precious time and effort in sending physical invoices to customers.
Cost Reduction
Online payments reduce your overhead costs spent on paper, supplies, and postage. Moreover, creating and printing physical copies of the invoice requires additional staff focused on manual billing and invoicing, which means more money being burnt on paying salaries.
Improves Cash Flow
Since online payments work 24/7, you can accept payments any time of the day regardless of the business hours. This helps improve cash flow as money comes in faster since there is you don’t have to wait for cheques to be deposited and cleared by the bank.
Helps Automate Recurring Payments
If you sell subscription-based services, or have regular clients, accepting online payments can help you set up recurring billing. This helps in better client retention as it’s a set and forget program that doesn’t pester clients with repeated notifications to make a payment and helps clear payments on time once registered. Moreover, the billing can be customized as per an individual client’s billing cycle.
Increase your Customer Base
Accepting online payments opens up new avenues to increase your client base. The millennial generation mostly doesn’t carry cash and some even don’t have checkbooks. They mostly make transactions using their phone, even while making micro-transactions daily.
Moreover, new technologies like UPI and digital wallets are making physical currency redundant, and e-payments are the future. So, if you want to increase your client base, the ability to accept online payments can go a long way.
Simplified Reporting and Reconciliation
Having an integrated digital payment processing for your business helps in keeping all transactions centralized which makes reconciling faster and simpler making your bookkeeping more efficient.
Offer Secure Payments
Collecting and storing a customer’s payment information manually can put that information at risk of a data breach. This can result in huge financial losses and a dip in brand value. In the case of an online payment form, all sensitive payment information is stored by a third-party processor which reduces your liability. Moreover, it gives customers more confidence in your brand when they can make payments at the click of a button without risking sensitive information.
Accepting online payments is more the norm than an exception these days, and if your business isn’t doing that already, you are losing a lot of revenue. Therefore, if you are an online merchant and value your business as well as your customers, then giving them the option of making online payments is the way to go.
Many payment gateway providers are available through which you can set up your online business to accept payments. Moreover, if you spend some time researching the best ones out there, you can give your clientele more flexibility and customization while they shop online!
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