As a result of state and local government guidelines, brick-and-mortar businesses are beginning to reopen after being shuttered for weeks or even months. Accordingly, many business owners are shifting to a more positive attitude—one of hope.

Still, some anxiety remains over what the future will bring and what a normal business day will look like. You may be experiencing some uncertainty and confusion over what’s expected of you as a business owner.

With their sleek design and powerful restaurant POS capabilities, Clover’s lineup of smart terminals are the perfect solution for food services businesses. And now, in addition to their powerful tools for managing on-site restaurant orders, Clover is offering its Online Ordering Solutions so that businesses can start accepting food orders online with ease!

At a time when more and more customers are opting for food delivery or takeout, Clover Online Ordering is truly a quick and easy way to appeal to these new preferences. Plus, it’s completely free for all merchants who use the Clover Station countertop device!

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted usual business practices and consumer behaviors, leading to a tremendous increase in chargebacks—and if you’re a business owner, it’s likely you’ve experienced this firsthand. While the travel and hospitality industry has been hit particularly hard due to increased travel cancellations, it’s certainly not the only industry that’s experiencing an increase in chargebacks: other factors such as inventory issues, shipping delays, and a spike of ‘friendly-fraud’ chargebacks filed by cash-strapped customers have affected merchants everywhere.

In this article, we’ll dive into several key factors that are contributing to the chargeback explosion during COVID-19, and share some practical steps that merchants can take to reduce negative outcomes. Plus, we’ll discuss some unique and timely circumstances in which cardholders actually do not have the grounds to dispute transactions.

Back in 2015, the card brands began requiring U.S. businesses to upgrade their point-of-sale equipment to support the processing of secure EMV chip-card technology. Once this requirement went into effect, merchants who supported EMV payments in their stores were no longer liable for costs incurred by fraudulent EMV transactions.

However, this liability shift in 2015 did not apply to gas stations, since the card brands knew that replacing gas terminals with EMV-ready equipment would be much more expensive and complex. Fuel dispensers were given until October of 2020—that is, until recently. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the four major card brands—Visa, American Express, Discover, and Mastercard—have all postponed their planned EMV liability shift for gas stations to April of 2021.

Consumers are rapidly changing their shopping patterns to stay as safe as possible during the coronavirus outbreak, and one way they’ve done so is through the use of contactless payment methods. In fact, Mastercard reported a 40% jump in contactless transactions during the first quarter of 2020! This new payment preference has been spurred on by recent recommendations from leading organizations like the World Health Organization as well as local governments like the State of New Jersey that have signed executive orders mandating that businesses arrange for contactless payments when possible.

The leading e-commerce platform, Magento, will be sunsetting Magento 1 this coming June—and in order to avoid security risks, PCI noncompliance, and other issues, users of Magento 1 will need to upgrade to Magento 2.

Here’s everything you need to know:

To support our brick-and-mortar merchants and their customers during the coronavirus pandemic, we are now reselling APG Cash Drawer’s Guardiant Countertop Shield, a durable plexiglass screen that can be easily installed at the point of sale in order to reduce the spread of contagious airborne viruses and bacteria. The perfect solution for retail stores, pharmacies, cafes, and medical offices, the Guardiant Countertop Shield will give your customers greater peace of mind and help keep your business that much safer.

Your in-store payment terminals are handled by many different people every day, which makes them ideal homes for viruses and bacteria. That’s why regular sanitation of payment terminals and other frequently-touched surfaces in your store is always important, and particularly during flu season. Due to the recent spread of coronavirus, though, it’s become more important than ever for retailers to sanitize their terminals on a daily basis. 

Here’s a quick guide on how you can disinfect your terminals within minutes:

What you can do to help keep your customers and employees safe during the COVID-19 outbreak.

A cashless ATM, otherwise known as point-of-banking technology, is a payment terminal that enables customers to make purchases with a debit card in the same way as they would make an ATM transaction to withdraw cash. The system was originally created as an alternative payment solution to serve high-risk businesses—such as legal medical marijuana dispensaries and certain types of “blacklist” businesses—that typically accept cash as the primary form of payment. Now, a variety of other types of businesses use this method of payment acceptance as well, including lunch trucks and vendors at farmer’s markets, for example.

In part 3 of Fidelity’s Effective Chargeback Management Series, we’ll be focusing on the chargeback reason code “Credit Not Processed”