You should buy a credit card reader for your small business.
If you are going to open your own business, you should think about getting a credit card reader. The reason for this is that more and more people take care of all their transactions with either their credit card or their debit card. Therefore, if you do not have a card reader, you will either lose out on their business, or inconvenience your customers – both of which are bad. There are a few times when it is not necessary to deal with card readers – for instance, if your business is in the middle of a district where there are plenty of nearby ATM machines, you might not need one at all.
There are two basic options if you are going to accept credit cards. The first thing that you can do is to purchase your own card reader. These magnetic stripe readers are not particularly expensive. However, you will not be able to differentiate between credit and debit cards. Therefore, if you get customers who use a debit card, you will have to treat it like a credit card. This just results in a little more time for the customer as he or she will have to sign the receipt.
You can also get a check stripe reader if you are not going to use credit cards. However, the check stripe readers are even more expensive than credit card readers – so you might find it worthwhile to take credit and debit cards instead of checks.
Another option is that you can rent a card reader. Some companies do this now. While it will probably be cheaper than buying your own card reader, and you may even get a touch pad so that your customer can input his or her debit card pin number, you may have to charge a small transaction fee every time a card is used in order to pay the rental costs.
Whether you buy or rent a credit card reader, you should find some way to have one in your business. Credit cards are used so often that you’ll lose some business otherwise – and you don’t want to lose business due to being unprepared for a popular payment method.