Feb 15, 2023

5 Advantages of Electronic Payments for Your Business

Electronic payment (e-payment) is a digital monetary transaction between merchant and customer. Currently, there are various types of e-payment channels, such as Visa, Master, UnionPay, Octopus, FPS, Apple Pay, PayMe, WeChat Pay, AlipayHK etc., and merchants can select the e-payment channels based on their store type and preference.

E-payment offers a number of advantages and benefits to your business, and here are some of them:

1. Instant Payment and Saving Time

On the customer side, purchase with e-payments is more convenient and fast. They can pay by simply swipe or tap, and complete the transaction in just a minute. The quick process not only helps customers to save time from queuing, but also provides them with a better shopping experience.

On the merchant side, the process time of e-payment is much less than traditional payment, such as cash and cheque, which may take a few days to clear. That means merchants can receive the money much faster, which definitely can help to improve the cash flow.

In addition, e-payment allows customers to make purchases at any time, from anywhere, so your business is no longer limited by time and location.

2. Reduce Manpower

With e-payment, transactions can be done in an automated environment, which means lesser front-desk staff or cashiers are required.

More and more merchants, especially in F&B industry, apply e-payment in their check-out process, to solve the problem of manpower shortage. Like McDonald’s and Café de Coral, they implemented more and more self-service kiosks to maintain high service standards by providing customers with a fast ordering solution even with minimum staffing.

Customers can place their orders at self-service kiosks, and make payment directly at the kiosks via e-payment method, and no longer need to wait in lengthy lines for ordering. In just a few taps, customers can then move out of the line to wait until their orders are ready for picking up, which greatly decreases their waiting time.

3. POS Integration

Integrating the e-payment system with your POS system (and/or ERP system as well) can help you streamline your business operations and improve your business efficiency by eliminating duplicate data entry and increasing accuracy.

4. Better Payment Security

E-payment is more secure than traditional methods, as you will have less cash in and around your shop, which lowers the risk of robbery, human error, and fraud, and you don’t need to worry about carrying large amounts of cash walking down the street to the bank as well.

However, merchants should select their e-payment system carefully, and choose the one with higher security standards, in order to protect your business from fraudulent transactions.

5. Reduce Payment Error

Payment delay and human error are common in transactions, especially with traditional payment methods, such as cash or cheque, which are processed manually.

With an e-payment system, the whole payment process will be speeded up, errors will be eliminated, and delay will be reduced, as most of the manual tasks are automated.