{Guest Post} 6 reasons why your business should collect payments online

If you have a product or service you sell online, having an online payment gateway is a no-brainer. When we started out at Exotel, in spite of being a SaaS company, we didn’t accept online payments. Our payments were made via cheque or sometimes even cash. There were lots of delays. At times we couldn’t coordinate collections at the right time. And this delay affected account setup and customers being able to get started. One of the things we prided ourselves about at Exotel is the simplicity of the set up process. Actually, cloud telephony gives you the liberty to do that. Not having an option to pay online also turned out to be another factor contributing to the buyer’s decision cycle.

We got an online payment gateway in place when we scaled to about 50 customers to collect payments online. Initially, our customers showed some reluctance to use online payments. We offered gentle nudges by way of discounts to encourage our customers to pay online.

Even now, we offer our customers the flexibility to use other modes of payment but more than 70% of our customers regularly prefer to pay us online.

If this doesn’t seem like a nudge enough for you to try out online payment methods for your business, you should hear from our friends at Instamojo. Ruchir Kanakia, from Instamojo gives you several reasons why you should consider enabling online payments for your business.

Over to Ruchir.

Instamojo, as a product, marries commerce to payments. It is the simplest way to setup an online payment system for your company. We have over a thousand merchants who are registered on our platform. We strive to make online payments easy, seamless & hassle free for all our merchants

You should collect payments online for your business for the following reasons

1. Scalability – Companies can scale from 100 payments to 50,000 payments with little or no effort on their system. Hence, it is very easy to scale an online payments system as opposed to managing cash which involves hiring more people and installing monitoring system to prevent theft.
2. Cash Management- Banks charge a small fee everytime cash is deposited over a certain amount in an account. Also, human effort is involved in carrying a large sum of cash to the bank. Hence, you end up spending more over a period of time. You need to factor in duplicate and torn notes which cause is a major issue while accepting cash.
3. Account Reconciliation – If you accept NEFT, Cheque or Cash, tracing a transaction back to a buyer is very difficult. Also, someone has to manually reconcile the accounts and the buyer cannot avail of the service or product unless the vendor provides him with a credit line.
4. Limited Time – NEFT transactions can be initiated only between 9 am to 5 pm on a working day. Also, to manage cash you need an employee or person. It is possible to accept online payments anytime and you can serve your customers 24*7.
5. Productivity- You need to spend so much time thinking about and managing your payment processes whereas the same time can be used to focus on growing your core business.
6. Buyer Preference- More & more buyers now prefer to pay online. Hence it is always good to give customers as many options as possible to buy a product or service. It goes without saying “Customer is King”