Running a small business today means meeting customers where they are - and the average American carries almost four credit cards, with cards making up around 31% of all US payment transactions. Offering more ways to pay is one of the simplest ways to boost sales.
The ways to accept cards
- In person - countertop terminals, mobile readers (Square, PayPal Zettle) and full POS systems (Clover, Toast, Lightspeed).
- Online - payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net, or built-in checkout from Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix.
- Contactless and mobile - NFC tap-to-pay and digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.
- Virtual terminals, recurring billing and invoicing - for phone orders, subscriptions and B2B clients.
Choosing a processor
Look past the headline rate. Compare total pricing and hidden fees, ease of setup, security (PCI compliance, encryption, fraud tools), customer support, and how well it integrates with your accounting and inventory. Every processing bill is made of interchange fees (70-90%), assessment fees (5-10%) and the processor's own markup (5-15%).
The Cash Swipe angle
There is a way to stop paying those fees altogether. A cash discount program legally passes the roughly 3% cost to the customer who chooses to pay by card: a $100 item is $103 on credit and $100 in cash. The person who installs that program inside a business earns 1% of the processing volume as passive income - and Cash Swipe has helped over 1,000 people do exactly that, saving merchants millions in fees each year.