Your Guide to Updating Credit Card Terminals

Credit card machines are evolving at a rapid pace, and businesses are finding themselves facing important decisions regarding when and how to upgrade. Upgrading is a necessity with chip cards coming to your local store, but how far should you go before you’ve taken care of the necessities for your business? While every business will be different, these guidelines should help you come to some basic conclusions as you look through your options.

Future Proofing

As you’re looking at what might be your new credit card swipe machine, consider some important concepts that you might have to deal with in the future:

• eCommerce: are you prepared to host a payment processor online in order to accept payments through your website? If not, you might miss out on potential business.
• Mobile: can your credit card machine accept mobile payments? Are your staff members equipped with mobile payment processors?
• Security: Another concern is security. Hacking isn’t going away, it’s going to get worse as time goes on. Smaller stores who can’t afford state of the art security are going to become targets. Upgrading will help shield your company from some of that liability.

The bottom line is that you need to consider the next 5-10 years of this technology, instead of the next one or three.

Final Thoughts

Updating isn’t cheap, but it is integral to the future of your business. Don’t make this decision until you’ve looked at the needs of your business. When you’re ready, try and future proof your purchases by looking into the future and studying trends in retail and customer service.

Charge.com Payment Solutions, Inc. has been voted the number one merchant account provider for retail, mobile and eCommerce businesses for six years running.