Merchant Cash Advance Blog

For many retailers, the back-to-school season offers a rush of customers buying new products, services and wardrobes to help see them through the latest semester. However, customers are spending in smaller volumes this year, demonstrating that business owners need to devise new ways of attracting shoppers and driving their customers toward their checkout registers and credit card processing services. 

Families with school-age children will spend an average of $634.78 on apparel, shoes, supplies and electronics for school purposes this year, down from the $688.62 recorded in regards to the same statistic at this time last year, according to a report from the National Retail Federation compiled by Prosper Insights & Analytics. Total domestic back-to-school spending is expected to exceed $26 billion. When you include back-to-college spending, then the number increases to over $72 billion. 

Many business owners think that the latest social media websites are the most effective way to drive consumer attention to their products - and toward their online credit card processing terminals. 

However, a more classical form of digital communication may still be the preference of the average customer: aside from search engines, consumers would rather learn about stores and promotions via email than they would by any other means, according to a new survey conducted by Millward Brown Digital.

The back to school shopping rush is a yearly tradition, but recent studies suggest that American consumers may be approaching their purchases in a different way this year. Findings suggest that customers are expecting more out of the online merchant account services offered to them by retailers, and that they'll turn to competitors if they provide optimized e-commerce services. Virtual credit card terminals are no longer enough to satisfy consumers - now the entire shopping process must be filtered through a smartphone. 

Many people like to think they can do everything through their Facebook - speak to their friends, discuss their work, post updates on their life, listen to music, and whatever else they would like. But the social media corporation recently announced their aims to offer users a new perk: the ability to purchase products using nothing more than their account ID. 

Facebook is planning to test the product over the course of the next month, according to a report from All Things D. With the use of the new system, users would be able to link their billing information to their Facebook ID through the cloud. From that point, whenever they wished to purchase a product through a mobile application, they would be able to do so simply by logging into their Facebook account. For many online merchants, large numbers of potential customers are lost at the check-out screen - so this attempt to expedite the process could leave to a large uptick in sales for online stores. 

Payment processing systems – and the methods of accepting credit card payments – continue to evolve. Only the industry isn't getting bigger, it's getting smaller. In fact, it's going mobile.

Mobile point-of-sale terminals will become much more prolific over the ensuing years, according to a press release featuring figures obtained by TechNavio. The firm predicts a compound annual growth ratio of more than 11 percent for the mobile POS industry, starting with figures recorded from last year and stretching out toward their annual projections leading up to 2013.