
The pandemic accelerated a transition to cashless payments, forcing a reckoning among small-business owners. But there are benefits: An owner said one cashless system saved her $3,000 a month.

Thanks for reading this post and Brass Ring also thanks those whose content is shared here on our website. We present it in order to pass on their knowledge to our small business clients so it can help them remain informed, healthy and growing their businesses. Please bookmark our site, subscribe to our newsletter and come back for more marketing, small business & WordPress tips, advice, tools & news! - Edward A. Sanchez
July 14, 2023
“Making It Work” is a series about small-business owners striving to endure hard times.
When Egypt Otis opened her business, Comma Bookstore and Social Hub, three years ago in Flint, Mich., the pandemic was full blown. But her neighbors welcomed the literature and art she sold in her store that celebrated people of color, as well as the community programs she hosted.
Despite the warm reception, Ms. Otis quickly found that she had a sales problem: Her customers wanted to pay with their cellphones.
“I realized that people were hardly keeping a wallet or a physical card, which limited my ability to sell and make money,” Ms. Otis said. So she upgraded her transactions platform to include tap-and-go purchases on mobile devices. “People are not carrying cash,” she said. “It’s becoming obsolete.”
The number of Americans who say they are “cashless” has jumped in the last five years. Forty-one percent of Americans said they did not use cash for their purchases in a typical week in 2022, up from 29 percent in 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last October.
Small-business owners increasingly are making the switch to cashless payments for several reasons, including rising consumer demand, faster checkout, lower labor costs and increased security. Those who wait risk losing revenue, experts say.
But there are drawbacks to going cash-free, including a learning curve for entrepreneurs who may not understand how to set up digital payments, a lack of accessibility to credit cards for low-income consumers, and privacy concerns.

Juanny Romero was an early adopter of digital payments for her small business. Fifteen years ago, when she founded Mothership Coffee Roasters, a chain of coffee shops in Las Vegas, she began using Square, a low-cost digital payments system for small businesses.
“I was a young businesswoman and not astute,” she said. But Square saved her $3,000 a month in merchant fees for credit card processing.
Even so, customer demand prompted her to return to cash sales, which Ms. Romero said are holding steady at about 11 percent of her overall revenue. She said she would go cashless if the share dipped below 10 percent.

The pressure to adapt is growing. More that 2.8 billion mobile wallets were in use at the end of 2020, and that is projected to increase nearly 74 percent to 4.8 billion — nearly 60 percent of the world’s population — by the end of 2025, according to a study released in 2021 by Boku, a fintech company
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.