How to do you bit to help local businesses reduce merchant fees
Our regular customers may have noticed that over the past few months the LCB team have been asking you to insert and manually select your savings account, or pay via cash or direct bank transfer, instead of using credit cards or tap and go.
This is a summary of our cost of acceptance for our current eftpos provider. As you can see, our business pays a significant % fee for the convienience of credit card tap and go payments.
When you add these fees up over the financial year, it is costing us thousands in fees that are going to the banks and merchants, instead of being spent locally and employing local people in our store.
For example, if you buy a new bicycle for $1000 and use tap and go VISA or Mastercard, we pay the merchant a $10.70 fee for the convienience of them handling that transaction. Considering that freight costs have nearly doubled in the past two years, and other costs have also gone up, this fee takes a big bite out of what are increasingly slim margins on our goods which we rely on to stay profitable and provide a service to the community.
Our trial over the past few months has resulted in reducing our average merchant fees by about 20% compared to the previous quarter. This is great for us and we want to continue to give this a go. The alternative, otherwise, is to instead have customers pay the merchant fee at point of sale, which we’ve noticed many other hospitality and retail stores in town implement in the past year. We’d prefer not to do that though.
So remember to please do your bit to help: Don’t let banks and credit card merchants take away money from local organisations and small businesses. Pay with cash or EFTPOS insert where you can. Cash does have fees and risks associated with it too, so or for larger purchases, the best and most secure option is to pay for goods using direct bank transfer.
