While most customers still prefer traditional payment methods, many consumers prefer contactless payment options and steadily increasing. In these days of COVID-19, almost half of customers say they prefer mobile payment methods, such as text or Apple pay. As our way of life leans more and more towards digital living, that number is going to increase.
Offering contactless payments is not only convenient for your customers but speeds up the checkout process and keeps you and your employees safer. It is also quickly becoming the experience your customers expect from you.
What are contactless payments?
Contactless payments are payments made without any physical contact or interaction. They include using text to pay, mobile wallets, app payments, and using credit cards embedded with touchless technology. The simplest of these is sending a text with a secure link that customers can click to pay.
Why are contactless payments necessary?
With the dangers of COVID-19 on everyone’s minds, contactless payments deliver a safer way to collect and process payments. More importantly, customers want these options—not only to stay safe, but also for convenience.
95% of consumers want companies to implement physical protection and distancing measures to help keep them healthy (including payment methods).
84.4 % of consumers have used services such as contactless payments since COVID-19.
80.3% of consumers want pandemic-friendly services to continue post-COVID.
How to get started
To offer contactless payments, you can start by implementing a platform, like SwipeSimple, that makes processing a payment as simple as sending a text.
With SwipeSimple, you simply text customers a secure payment link (through our PCI-compliant software) that they can click to pay using Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit or debit. This allows you to harness the ease of texting in your payment processing which has become increasingly popular during the pandemic. In fact, a recent report indicated that consumers now prefer texting to other common methods of business communication and that over 65% of consumers think texting makes working with a local business more convenient and smarter.
You simply:
Text the customer a link.
They click and pay.
Done.
During the middle stages of the pandemic many businesses have found success collecting payments via messaging with SimpleSwipe provided by Coastal Payment Systems. By simply sending texts with payment links, allowing customers to conveniently pay without contact, without a credit card, and without having to go inside their business. Texting invoices allows payment more quickly and consistently as well.
While the era of traditional payments is not over, the time to offer more flexibility, safety, and convenience to your customers is here to stay. Start collecting payments today.