Impulse buys account for more than half of retail sales. While not all impulse buys are at checkout, it’s certainly the easiest place to implement them. Successful impulse sales are achieved by understanding the mindset of the customer.  By paying attention to placement, item size and the customer’s’ immediate needs, a successful impulse purchase strategy can be implemented.

Summer camps, snow removal and vacation services are only active for a small portion of the year. They require the ability to accept payments during those few months, but most processors  will charge them a monthly fee or have the merchant reapply each year. Is there a better option?

Come the seasonal merchant account, which is custom-made for this purpose. There is no need to pay unnecessary fees or waste time on the application process each year. Credit checks, which potentially lower one’s credit score, do not have to performed each year. Additionally, if a merchant had credit problems during the year, it could prevent the merchant account from being opened entirely, or force them to get set up with a more expensive service. Unfortunately, past processing history does not entitle a merchant to the same service in the future. A seasonal account prevents these issues entirely.

The seasonal account allows a merchant to “press pause” on their account as opposed to a “hard stop”.  This way, the account is ready whenever the business needs it and all that needs to be done is send the processor a re-opening letter.

However, there are several things to keep in mind:

An article by American Express offers some solid advice on precautions retailers should take to prevent losing business if unscrupulous customers claim they never received delivered orders.

Small businesses are generally hit hard by chargeback fraud. Aaron Press, Director, Payments & eCommerce for LexisNexis said, “We do know that small merchants invest less in fraud protection and are more likely to be defrauded because they have fewer ways to catch things in the process, And fraudsters know this.”

If your business receives too many chargebacks, aside from losing valuable, you can potentially damage your standing with the processing bank. If the chargebacks continue, you may even lose your merchant account and face difficulties finding another service provider.

Here are some tips on how to avoid chargebacks altogether:

A billing descriptor is the way your business name appears on your customer’s monthly credit card statement. This may seem simple, but there’s a lot to know about choosing your billing descriptor, and what you don’t know could cost you.

The job of a descriptor is to describe the product or service purchased by the customer to explain a charge or refund.  These descriptors are fixed in length; standard credit card transaction descriptor length is 22 characters max. It will generally include the DBA name of the merchant and the name of the product or service, separated by an asterisk. Some processors allow for the merchant’s telephone number or website as well.

The billing descriptor is important because it reminds a customer what the transaction was, and helps avoid groundless chargebacks. Therefore it is critical that these descriptors be as specific and informative as possible. For this reason, merchants have several options on how they may choose to appear on customer statements.

The basic information about your company can be presented in two ways:

Loyalty programs are everywhere you look. At the airport, gas stations, grocery stores and coffee shops, every retailers seems to be offering some perk to its frequent customers. More and more business are recognizing the value of these programs in retaining existing customers. Why? Because it’s a cost effective and a vital component of maintaining a competitive edge in today’s marketplace.

Data shows that it costs business 5-10 times more to acquire new customers than sell to existing ones. Additionally, existing customers spend an average of 67 percent more than new customers.

Consumers have also come to expect loyalty programs, especially from larger retailers. Good rewards programs are wildly successful; they can be the reason that a customer always flies with Jetblue, or purchases all their cosmetics from Sephora.

For one reason or another, red flags are waving and your senses are telling you that the customer at your store counter is trying to purchase goods with a stolen credit card.

Maybe his name or signature are glaringly nothing like those on the ID. Maybe he’s quickly buying thousands of dollars’ worth of your most expensive items. Maybe he’s suspiciously trying to buy one hundred of the same kind of high-end camera.

Now what?

According to PCI standards, a merchant may never store lists with customer’s card data on any medium which is not PCI compliant. Word documents and spreadsheets, even if they have a strong password, are not PCI compliant, and thus may never be used to store lists with card info. Even if you create a custom program with many levels of security, it is still not PCI compliant.
(The exception to this regulation would be to store the info of one card on a piece of paper. However, multiple numbers are never allowed, even on paper)

An owner or stakeholder of a company should never swipe their personal card at their business. This is considered a cash advance and is prohibited by the Card Association guidelines, established by Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover.

If a merchant processing bank fee or charge is ever returned for insufficient funds, the processing bank will become concerned. Their reasoning will be that if the merchant doesn’t have coverage for a small fee, how would they be able to recover from a large potential chargeback?

When a customer sees a charge from a merchant they don’t recognize, there is a good chance that they will dispute the card.

For some merchants, the name that appears on customer’s statements is not the name that they operate with (a DBA) or print on receipts. When this occurs, it is important to communicate with customers and let them know which name to expect on their statements.