“No, we want you to use a different card”? It depends on how many of your customers care. I can assure you that some will, but they won’t necessarily tell you. How many repeat customers would you have to lose to eat up the $100 you saved in lower fees? If your business is working on a 50 percent gross profit margin, you would have to lose $200 of business, or about two customers out of 100. That is 2 percent. Might you only lose 1 percent? Maybe, but I doubt it. Could you lose 10 percent? Perhaps. And keep in mind, you may also lose the referrals and the repeat business of people who are with the person whose card you reject. It seems to me you have far more to lose than to gain.
Here’s my confession: For a long time, mine was one of those companies that did not want to pay the higher fees. I changed my mind after I went into a store that wouldn’t accept my American Express card. It didn’t make me happy, and I didn’t go back. And after that, I started to accept all cards at my business. I actually had one customer with an American Express card say to me, “I’ve only been bringing my personal business here. Now I can bring my business framing, too, because that’s the only company card I have.”
The point is, saving money can be perilous. With the economy soft, we’re all trying to cut costs, but there are all sorts of ways to save money without really saving money: not fixing a store sign, not updating a computer, not sending people for training. Sometimes a penny saved is not a penny earned — it’s two cents lost.
