So you have decided to start a catering business or perhaps you already have one and are thinking of increasing your customer base by accepting credit cards. That’s great! The next question is, “What kind of merchant will work best and still give me the best rates?”
Well, first of all, let me congratulate you on making a sound business decision. You will no doubt get many more customers giving you their business by providing them the option to pay with plastic. But making that decision was the easy part. The harder part is picking the right merchant account to fit your catering business.
Below are 3 reasons you may want to consider getting a small business merchant account that allows you to accept credit cards on your cell phone. This type of account is traditionally called a “Dial Pay” account.
1. It is a mobile solution. You can accept payment at your customer’s location or over the phone. This gives you added flexibility with your customers.
2. Your transaction cost does not downgrade to higher rate with your customers that use “corporate” or “business” credit cards. Visa and MasterCard require processors to charge more on transactions that fit this type. With many dial-pay accounts the processor eats the cost on these. Of coarse, you will want to check with the processor you are looking into to and make sure they do.
3. Low monthly fees. These types of accounts usually just have one low monthly fee and do not include a monthly minimum or annual fee. This is great for catering businesses since there may be some months that you don’t even accept payment with cards. Why pay a bunch of monthly and annual fees if you don’t use it all the time?
4. Save money on processing equipment. If you already have a cell phone like most people, that’s all you will need. You will avoid paying hundreds of dollars needlessly.
5. If you also have a restaurant it keeps the larger catering transactions separate. Some restaurant/catering business owners run into this problem. Because your catering transaction sizes are so much larger than your restaurant transaction sizes, the processing banks can get nervous and can even hold the funds for the higher catering transaction and require additional steps from the merchant. Having a separate Dial Pay account for this will prevent this unexpected and potentially damaging occurrence from happening.
Having wisdom is having insight into a matter and I hope this post gives you some insight into finding the right merchant account for your catering business.
