758 – Sell Things Get Paid Paid Paid: Tom talks Payment Processors

Episode 758 – Payment Processors
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 758 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about collecting the money. How about that? We're going to talk about payment processors and how you collect the money for selling stuff. I hope you didn't miss Episode 757. That's exciting video I gave you like more than a dozen tips to make your videos more exciting so you get more views and more engagement and more sales. And while I'm at it, throw in the episode 756. That was on live streaming. This can be a great addition to your business and build credibility and a great connection with your audience. And you can start on your cell phone if you want to. All right. The way you get to a back episode is you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. Live streaming with 756 exciting video with 757 and today payment processors is 758. All right. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and pick up a copy of our screwthecommute.com/automatefree business automation e-book. You will thank me because it just one of the tips will save you tens of thousands of keystrokes. It saved me. We actually figured it out. Close to 8 million keystrokes. So. So make sure you do that. I want you to spend some time with your prospects and customers and not fighting with your computer. Screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:54] All right, let's get to the main event. So if you're going to be in business, you got to have to collect money. Right? Right. That's just kind of makes sense. Now, in some types of businesses, you might simply get a check. And it used to be you had to take it to the bank and deposit it, but now you can actually do it right from your cell phone. I don't know how to do it, but you can do it. But one thing pretty important for business is that you have an actual business checking account. Many of the things you will want to do won't work with just the personal account, but you can certainly start that way. And most most people actually start with PayPal. It's the most widely used online payment method around the world. According to some reports, it's caused like an 82% higher conversion rate with people, you know. So so I'm going to cover other payment companies a little later. But but here's my experience with PayPal over many years. Paypal is great. I've never had any problems with it. The only problem people have and many don't even know it, is that if you only have PayPal as a way to take payments, potential customers may think you're like a reject from eBay. See, eBay bought PayPal a long time ago. Some may think, How could you be a substantial company they can trust if you only have PayPal to take money? And this is a valid concern, even though you can finagle a way to take regular credit cards with PayPal. Many people still have this worry that it's, you know, if that's the only way they can pay you, that you may not be very substantial and they don't know if you're going to be there tomorrow when and actually ship their product or give them their product.

[00:03:43] So what should you do? Well, first, a little bit of history. When I first started online, it was almost impossible to get a merchant account unless you had a storefront. Now. Luckily, I had lots of money in the bank and a long time track record with my bank. And even though they've been bought out and changed names several times, I've been with them, I think 45 years. So I'm not expecting you to have that kind of track record. And and things have gotten way easier for home based businesses to get merchant accounts. But the first place I would tell you to go to get a regular merchant account is a bank you've been with for a while and and haven't had any trouble with them. In other words, you don't bounce checks and you repay on time any loans you have with them, that kind of stuff. Now start there and check their rates and how easy they try to make it for you to get up and running with your merchant account. If not, there's just just a Google online merchant accounts and you'll get flooded with places that want to give them to you nowadays. Now keep in mind you will have monthly fees to have a regular merchant account whether you sell anything or not. This is just the cost of doing business. And listen to this which which is a lot of ease your pain.

[00:05:01] A little bit of the monthly fees. We have seen businesses increase their sales about 15% just because they have both PayPal and a merchant account. See, having the merchant account gets rid of the stigma of looking shady or not substantial by only having PayPal. But people do like to spend their PayPal money, so when they get rid of that stigma, they're willing to do more business with you. Apparently from these 15% increases we've seen. And I'm thinking that that extra 15% of sales should more than cover the monthly fees of having a merchant account. Now, another big mistake I see many small business owners make is to refuse to take American Express. Because American Express charges a little bit higher fees. Like I said, this is a big capital, big mistake. Generally, people that have American Express cards are a little more well-heeled. And and also it's the main card of many businesses that have enormous amounts of money to spend. Right. It's pretty shortsighted to alienate these people and companies because you want a penny pinch a few percentage points, especially if you're doing digital stuff like I teach. You know, you got 97% profit or okay, maybe it's 90, only 96 if it's American Express. Right. So forget that. Take American Express. Okay. Back to PayPal, because PayPal is by far the most widely known and accepted payment system. That's why my kickstart cart shopping cart system allows you when you check out to pick whether you want to pay by credit card or PayPal, it gets rid of that stigma.

[00:06:54] People that never heard of me know that, Oh, this is a substantial company. They have credit cards and PayPal. And so here. Here. I got an idea for you. Go ahead and buy something off of me so you can see it in action. How about that? And I was going to say, buy something really expensive so you can see it even better. Okay. All right. So let's take a look at some of the other systems that are much lesser known but are being used by people. I'm going to list off a bunch of them here. I don't use them personally. But you have Stripe, Venmo, Apple Pay Square, Gumroad, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Checkout, MasterPass, and there's tons of others. That's just basically North American because that's where I'm concentrating on this episode. If you have an Asian market, then there are completely different systems available in those markets, primarily I think used on mobile devices. And but in the north American market, the credit and debit cards are primarily dominant. Deloitte said that 80% of transactions made by millennials are still by card, but you know, available. You'll see occasionally people using them. We have E-wallets, you've got Apple Pay and Microsoft Wallet, Samsung Pay, Alipay and others in different regions. These allow you to use your phone or smartwatch to make payments. You have others like Stripe and Square. Now I can hardly keep up with all the different ones, but I'm including in the show notes a link to a great article that compares Stripe Square and PayPal.

[00:08:47] It was by nerdwallet an article on their site. Now for all the other ones I mentioned, if you really want to look in deeper to this, just Google them or what I like to do is a comparison search like I might search for gumroad versus vs square and I see what I come up with. And here's a tip. Whenever you're doing a search like that, keep in mind that the sponsored listings at the top are going to be biased towards the system they are trying to sell. So their comparison may not be really fair, but it's a lot of them still have some good information. At any rate, you have to collect money if you and if you want to get going fast. It's pretty obvious PayPal is your best bet and then start pursuing a full blown merchant account that includes American Express. Sometimes they make you sign up for American Express separately, but they still run it through Visa and Mastercard, your one merchant account there. And of course, I'm biased and want you to use my shopping cart system at Kickstart Cart.com, where I personally have used it for 20 years and we give unlimited free one on one training on the system as long as you have it. Now, I also I put a couple links below of some of the research I did for this episode. You'll want to check those out in the show notes. And then if you want help on this and the 100 million other things you got to do to be successful online, check out my mentor program at greatInternetMarketingtraining.com.

[00:10:24] So the longest running, most successful, most unique ever Internet and digital marketing mentor program. And I have no trouble saying that and I triple dog dare anybody to put theirs up against mine. And they won't because they're too embarrassed because mine will blow them away. You will get service you won't even believe. So check it out. And then also we have a new course on how to be a great podcast guest, or I can show you how to get invited back and get in front of hundreds of thousands of warm prospects on podcast interviews and how you're going to beat your competitors. So you get invited back and you get chosen to be on the shows. It's more than just what you do on the interview. It's all this other stuff that impresses the heck out of the host. Like, Look, this is episode what? 758 I've had hundreds of pitches to get on this show and most of them suck because they don't know what to say to me to make me really impressed. And I'm going to teach you that. So you beat the heck out of other people trying to get on shows. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/greatpodcastguest. And of course that's included free if you're in my mentor program. So check them out and I will catch you on the next episode. Go out and collect money folks. That's what we're all about here. All right. Catch you later.