Phone Orders and Checks...

[hulahoop]

Hello...

I use worldpay to handle all credit card transactions. However, I was wondering if most people what is the percentage of customers that would prefer to pay by phone or check.

I am thinking maybe some customer would prefer to pay by check as that's how their companys' pay for most purchases (a high percentage are of my customers are companies). They wouldn't want to pay with their own money and make claims.

What do you think?

[Robino]

From what I've seen while working for a few b2b companies, people like to call in and pay by check for large orders ($3K+).

Especially if there are multiple options offered on the products.

[Import Export]

With business you want to capture full potential, or at least get as close to that as possible. Offering more methods of payment should always* yield greater revenue. The larger your customer base, the more you will see the income rise as a result. Impliment as many payment options as possible, with respect to resources etc, and monitor your results. In 100% of my experience, I have seen multiple payment options yielding greater revenue.

*Hard to answer questions like this without knowing company and market specific information.

[otnot]

We recieve an equal amount of phone orders to online. It seems the ederly are suspicous of giving out credit card information. I have also noticed that return phone customers will use online ordering once they have established your ligit.

[martyt]

We've offered online credit card, PayPal, Call-in and mail-in payment options and find that a good percentage of our customers (individuals, not companies in our case) want to talk to a live person rather than enter their card information online. And a small percentage still want to send in a personal check -- even for a $5.00 purchase.

Our policy on checks is that we don't ship until the check clears the bank, typically resulting in a 1-week delay from the time we receive the check. Customers know that and if they still choose to pay by check, then so be it.

It is a bit of a hassle, though, to have to make the odd trip to the bank to deposit a $5.00 check...

Potentially on the "plus" side for your business, you might save a little bit of expense by taking a check payments -- you avoid the credit card processing fees, which are often a lot higher for corporate credit cards. Our normal discount rate doesn't apply to corporate cards or "purchasing" cards -- instead those get the "mid-qual" rate which is about 1.5% higher.

[johnbangkok]

We're not allowed to enter CC for the customer with our 3rd party processor (not a tel/mail order merchant account)

Is it OK to enter a check number for the client via processor, then waiting before shipping. Otherwise we have to send for collection (4-8 weeks!)

Does anyone have any experience of changing between merchant account & 3rd party processor?

Any major change in sales?

Personally I like the independent 3rd party sites as I know the site doesn't get my CC details to charge as much and often as they like.

But I've read posts that indicate less trust given to sites using 3rd party processors - Paypal, clickbank, worldpay, etc. and more to those with inline credit card processing (even sometimes without Https! )

Both?!