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Help! Which EMV Payment Terminal Should I Use in My Business?

I recently received an email from a merchant with a problem so common that I thought I’d share it with all of you. Many small business merchants are too busy running their businesses to keep up with the latest developments in payment processing hardware and security. That said, they’ve been informed that they will need new hardware or face increased liability in case of fraud.

So if you need a crash course in the different types of EMV terminals and their respective benefits, this post is for you.

Dear Rick,

I’m starting to panic. The liability shift is just 2 months away and we don’t have any EMV-ready terminals at our gym. Not sure how to begin the shopping process. Any insight would be hugely appreciated.

Top 5 Myths about EMV Every Merchant Should Know

If you accept credit cards in your brick-and-mortar business, you hopefully have heard the term EMV and are preparing your business to update its current credit card processing terminals.

More and more payment card issuers are replacing old payment cards with new ones which feature an embedded chip.

After October 1st, if a data breach causes customer financial data to be exposed, the liability for such a breach will fall to whichever party in the transaction has the lesser technology.

When a change like this affects so many merchants at the same time, deciding how to proceed can be stressful and even a bit confusing.

While much is known about EMV technology, there are also quite a few misconceptions. In this article, we’ll address 5 common EMV myths.

The Tide is Turning: How to Leverage the mCommerce Boom

There seems to be some confusion about what exactly constitutes mCommerce.

For the sake of this article, we’ll define it as “the sale or purchase of goods and services via mobile/wireless devices.” This includes apps, as well as mobile-optimized webpages.

While the ability to conduct commerce via a mobile platform is a given in industries like music, apps and games, mobile commerce (or mCommerce) is becoming more and more relevant for other industries in and out of the retail sector. For example, in the B2B world, a recent survey of C-level executives found that 77% use their smartphone to research and ultimately purchase products and services for their businesses.

3 Creative eCommerce Models that Yield Substantial Subscription-Based Revenue

What’s an ACH Payment? How Does ACH Benefit My Business? photo

It pays to consider (and reconsider) all options. We live in a day and age, where today’s “King of the Hill” can become tomorrow’s old news.

Markets are disrupted at a pace never seen before. Disruptions used to be slow, because getting capital for unproven concepts required capital that was hard to find outside of banks or venture capital firms.

Today crowdfunding platforms like indigogo.com have changed how and at what pace new concepts can be taken to market. The new rule is: “innovate or die.”

There’s no doubt that if you sell a consumable product like razors or diapers that there’s a lot of money to be made by offering those products as an ongoing subscription. Customers agree to pay dollarshaveclub.com or diapers.com on a schedule and have their credit cards charged, and their products delivered, on a schedule. These make sense right away.

But there are other ways to leverage the power of a recurring billing model. Here are 3 options worth investigating:

DIY Recurring Payments? Read This Before You Go Any Further

Moving to or adding a recurring revenue model will definitely cause a spike in customer sales. It will also increase the number of interactions you have with each customer. This is important to consider if you are planning a DIY approach to automating the recurring transactions (i.e. coding it yourself).

Trying to build and implement your own payment processing platform is a complex undertaking and can cause real headaches, missed revenue opportunities and big client problems due to billing errors. Administrative costs will be higher too. In-house programming will also inhibit your ability to quickly change your offerings, because every change requires new coding. Here are some key things to consider: