As a business owner, you want your business to become successful. However, all this is dependent on the measures you employ to guarantee business growth and success.
Let’s put this to perspective. Almost 50% of all business startups do not make it to their fifth anniversary. Even worse, 82% of these businesses fail due to poor management of cash.
Therefore, if you want your enterprise to be successful, then you’ll need to invest in an integrated payment platform. Here, you will get an opportunity to manage your cash better.
A common point of sale (POS) and payment process will help you raise your sales. However, an integrated payment option like Openedge helps streamline your accounting, lower the costs, and improve your business efficiency. Ultimately, these benefit leads to higher profits, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve productivity in your store.
In this post, we’ll focus on the importance of payment integration in a retail outlet. But first;
What is Payment Integration?
It’s the process of aligning systems and platforms that facilitate business payments. As a retailer, it means connecting your POS system with Openedge allowing data to flow smoothly between these platforms.
The setup helps make work easier for your cashiers at the checkout counter. They don’t need to manually key in the details of your customer’s credit card information. Since your POS is integrated with your payment processor, all the necessary information is ready once your cashiers initiate the payment process.
Why Should You Opt for an Integrated Payment Option?
At first, it seems like payment integration is only useful at the checkout counter. However, that’s not true! It has positive impacts in different areas of your business which includes business intelligence, profitability, and customer service.
Let’s look at these benefits in detail.
Allows You to Run an Efficient Store
As an entrepreneur, you do not want to keep your customers waiting at the checkout line. On average, a shopper is only willing to spend between 5 to 10 minutes before abandoning their purchase. If this happens frequently, then you’ll be missing out on potentially higher sales.
Investing in payment integration reduces checkout time. The shopping lines will move as quickly as possible. You and your customers will be happy at the experience.
The good thing is, if the experience is good, the customers will be willing to come back and shop with you. All of this will boost your sales revenue.
Reduces Human Error
No matter how good your clerks are, they are bound to make errors. It’s human nature.
However, a simple mistake like misreading a number can lead to headaches and unnecessary costs. These are among the last things you want in your firm.
Fortunately, using a payment integration system reduces human errors. Other than lowering manual typing at payment point, it eliminates the need for manual reconciliations at the end of the day which reduces human errors.
Increases Cash flow
Having an accurate understanding of your business cash flows is an essential management role. No business can survive and become successful if it doesn’t have adequate cash to pay employees, suppliers, tax obligations, and other operating costs.
Before electronic payment was a thing, businesses had to wait for days or weeks to get payment invoices or bank statements. Such a company would then feed this information into the general ledger or any accounting software.
However, payment integration allows for these roles to happen in the background. Therefore, you can generate a report on the specific amount of money your business has before the end of the day. With such information, you’re able to manage your inventory, pay suppliers, employees, and make better financial decisions.
Conclusion
Payment integration is a matter of when, not if, your business implements the technology or not. Remember, most customers are shifting to online and check options to pay for their shopping. With this, it’s imperative that you invest in a payment integration system. It will make it easier for payments to flow seamlessly to your account without the need to manually key in any data. All this will boost your cash flow, reduce human error which will allow you to manage your business efficiently.
