Chosen Payments

An Example of Foolish Leasing Beverly, the owner of a local dry-cleaning business for over 30 years decides to sign a lease agreement for a new credit card terminal. Typically, from our experience here at Chosen Payments, we know that a credit card terminal purchased upfront is about 10% of what a merchant might pay over time in lease. Keep in mind, there are more expensive credit card processing devices and fully integrated systems, however; the lease payments will be higher at around $100+ per month for an average of 48 months for a total of $4,800.00 for a high-end system. Merchants are left paying monthly lease payments on a product that can no longer be serviced which not only means there is no value to the product, it also leaves them unsupported and open to a much higher risk of fraud.

If you haven’t heard that word, you have heard the phrase, “credit card breach”. The costs include absorbing the expense of issuing new cards to cardholders who had their data exposed, notifying the cardholders of the breach and losses caused by fraudulent use of the stolen card data. As a merchant, you are required to keep customer information such as passwords, credit card numbers and other personal data such as addresses and birthdays completely secure. Make sure that all parties involved in credit card processing for your business use E2EE.

While this provides health protection for employees, it may also create concerns with PCI compliance if your employees are handling and processing credit cards from home. When employees must process credit cards from home, evaluate the process of how employees will collect and process the transaction. It is important to note that any system involved in the storage, processing, or transmission of cardholder data becomes part of the CDE and must be deemed safe and within compliance requirements. An important consideration is that PCI DSS requires that upon significant changes to the CDE, a merchant must verify that all relevant PCI DSS requirements have been implemented within the new environment.

QR Codes (also known as Quick Response Codes) were first launched in 1994 as a machine-readable optical label that contains information or other Quick Response action to be taken. With the improvement of smartphone cameras and software, QR codes can now be used for everything from launching restaurant menus on a smartphone to paying for your meal using your smartphone and a QR code on a printed ticket. As the familiarization of QR codes continues to take place, merchants now have the ability to generate, print or display a unique QR code as a means of accepting payment for a purchase at the store or any in-person transaction. You can encourage your customers to use your QR codes and tie it to marketing efforts including codes that provide product details, a coupon or special offer, a YouTube video link, a social media page or special event details.