Your Credit Card is Hurting Small Business
The punishing trickle of dollars and cents
Cash back is really cool.
When I spend $10 at a gas station, I get 30 cents back toward my credit card statement — no matter what! For no reason!
It’s hard to turn this down.
It’s hard to turn down those cents, which eventually become dollars, which eventually become tens of dollars. If you’re smart, you’ll save them up for a while and use that free money towards a new laptop or a vacation.
Is it really free money, though?
As a t-shirt vendor, I know that a credit card swipe isn’t free for anyone. It’s convenient, so there’s a fee. If you accept a credit card payment through a Square POS terminal, you’re paying Square 2.6% of the transaction plus 10 cents.
With Shopify, the company my band uses, you pay 2.5% and 0 cents.
A company like Shopify allows you to do a lot more than accept credit cards. We also use it to manage our inventory and host our online store.
But we pay for that service. The credit card fees don’t grant us any additional access. It simply takes money out of our pockets.
On a grand scale, this can become costly. If I sold, say $100,000 worth of product in a…
