How Can I Process Payments for My Curbside Trash Bin Cleaning Company
Regardless of the industry, most payments these days happen electronically. You'd be hard-pressed to find a person who hasn't made some sort of an electronic payment at one time or another. Cash payments are quickly becoming a thing of the past. This is even more true for an industry like trash can cleaning services. This is because a successful trash bin washing company will receive many smaller payments from a lot of customers. These payments will generally be in the range of $15-40 each. Also, a lot of your trash can washing payments will be recurring. For example, Bill Smith pays you $22 each month for his monthly trash can cleaning service. He signs up only once but the payments need to be taken once per month.
Keeping all of this in mind, it can be troublesome to try and collect so many cash payments from many different people. Collecting payments this old fashioned way for an extremely successful trash can cleaning business which might have hundreds of different customers can, in itself, become a full-time job. By "cash" I also mean checks, which require you to obtain the check from the customer and then deposit it into your account for redemption.
Electronic payments eliminate these hassles, and make it much easier to collect payment. Let's look at the details of electronic payments, and how you can use them for your trash bin cleaning business.
How Do Electronic Payments Work?
Electronic payments have been around for a long time in one form or another. We've all paid for gas, groceries, or dinner using a credit card. For these transactions to take place, credit card companies process the payments electronically. First, they charge the consumer the amount they've agreed to. Next, the payment gets deposited into the account of the business being paid.
There is a small catch to this process though… you, the business owner, will be charged a fee for this process. More recently, you may have seen some businesses charging their customers a 3% fee if they pay with a credit card. This is the business passing the transaction fee over to consumer. By doing this, they're trying to motivate the consumer to pay with cash so the business owner doesn't have to pay the transaction fee. More accurately, it's so they don't don't have to pass that fee along to the consumer.
Utilizing Electronic Payments For My Trash Bin Washing Company
There are several different ways to process electronic payments for your trash can cleaning business. As mentioned earlier, the fee for processing electronic payments is roughly 3% regardless of who you use to process these payments.
Whether you utilze an online store to process your payments directly or your payments are taken through your routing software, all methods will utilize a payment gateway. Some of the more popular payment gateways include Stripe, Authorize.net, Square, and -- of course -- PayPal.
Using a payment gateway is simple. However, you'll probably need your web developer or some other tech guru to implement the service for you. Once it's setup though, it's simple to use. In fact, if you've ever bought anything from Amazon or another online store, you've used a payment gateway to complete the transaction.
Payment gateways can be setup to show the gateway being used (i.e. Payments processed through Stripe), or they can be hidden and simply let the consumer know what payment methods are accepted (i.e. We accept Master Card, Amex, Visa, Discover, etc).
Other Ways To Process Payments Electronically
At times, you may need to charge someone for a custom job that's not part of your online store. For example, your website may offer monthly, quarterly, and one-time trash can cleaning services. If you also offer pressure washing services, you'll probably need to look at the specifics of the job to know the exact cost. Or maybe you have a customer who sees you cleaning bins and says they'd like their bins cleaned just this once. Obviously, they can sign-up through your website. But for either of these type of jobs you can have a card reader on hand.
The card reader allows you to swipe their card and charge them on the spot. All payments gateways offer card readers. The hardware costs between $50-75 to purchase. One of the benefits of a card reader is that the payment gateway will actually charge you slightly less for using the card reader vs. someone paying via your website. I believe the reason for this is because they consider it to be a "safer" transaction since you have a physical card in hand.
