Are You Accepting Credit Cards Yet?

I like to revisit this topic about once a year, because it is getting easier and easier to accept credit cards. If you haven’t shopped for rates lately, you may want to do so, especially if your discount rate is 2% or more. If you are not yet accepting credit cards, I would certainly suggest giving it a try.

All of my previous arguments still apply. Some customers do not have comprehensive insurance, some don’t carry cash, and some like the protection that credit cards offer if they are not happy with their purchase. But now there is another reason that people are using credit cards. Credit card reward points. Actually, this benefit has been around a long time, but more and more credit card companies are now offering reward points every time the credit card is used.

With reward points you can purchase everything from jewelry to golf clubs, or even airline tickets. It takes a lot of points to purchase an airline ticket, but people have figured out that if they pay for everything with credit cards the points add up fast.

This is important because it is now much easier to convince customers to pay for repairs with their credit card, and submit the claim to their insurance company directly for reimbursement. By not having to contact the insurance company for a claim authorization, and not having to wait for payment from the insurance company, you are saving time. Since time is money in this business, you are also saving money.

On a typical $60.00 windshield repair, processing a credit card with a 1.5% discount will cost you $.90. If you spend 20 minutes on a repair and 10 minutes processing an insurance claim, you are only repairing two windshields per hour. If you save 10 minutes per repair by accepting credit cards rather than billing the customer’s insurance company, you save enough time to complete an extra repair every hour. Using this formula, you have the opportunity to
make an extra $58.20 per hour.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. You need to plug in your own numbers to see if accepting credit cards works for you, but I believe that offering your customer’s another convenient payment option makes good sense.

Credit card merchants are now competing for your business, so this is a great time to go shopping for discount rates.

-Brent Deines