As a business owner, you need people to purchase your products and offer legitimate forms of payment. While you can’t force people to use a certain payment method, you can expect that the majority of consumers will use credit cards. Here are the pros and cons of offline credit card processing.
What Is Offline Credit Card Processing?
Credit card processing systems require a direct connection to the internet to both authenticate a credit card and transact the purchase. This method works nine times out of ten, but sometimes, your internet goes down and customers still offer you credit cards for payment.
You don’t want to refuse a payment method and discourage the purchase, so you can use offline credit card processing to handle the request. This uses a system that builds a queue of offline purchases that will upload once the internet comes back on. The queue allows you to take credit cards even when you don’t have the tools to do so as normal.
What Are the Pros?
Offline credit card processing is a savvy way to ensure a customer buys your product. At every point of the customer’s journey, you are trying to convert interest into purchase. If this last step fails, then you’ve wasted time and resources on marketing campaigns, poster ads, flash sales, and inventory stock-ups. Offline processing is a great business continuity plan in the face of a challenge. It also helps those who travel and make their sales offline.
What Are the Cons?
You should familiarize yourself with a few risks associated with offline credit card processing. When you have internet, you can determine whether the credit card is viable or not, ensuring you don’t take a faulty card. But when offline, you can’t decline a credit card. If the card gets declined later, the customer is long gone with your products. On the other side of the table, you could endanger your customers’ credit card information. Any list of confidential information stored in a queue is vulnerable to a cyberattack. Someone can snatch that information the moment you reconnect.
Knowing the pros and cons of offline credit card processing can help you make the best decision for your business. There is always risk involved with business methods, but you can eliminate some of that mystery with trusty restaurant POS equipment like ours at Business Software Solutions.
