Credit Card Processing for Your Clothing Store
Your clothing business–be it online, over the phone, or in person–is like any other modern business: You need a way to accept credit and debit card payments.
Having online credit card processing ability is a must for ecommerce or over the phone clothing stores — cash on delivery (COD) isn’t always a good option, and COD facilitation fees are often higher than what’s charged by debit or credit card payment gateways or even by internet banking services.
Even if you have a brick and mortar clothing boutique, you cannot expect all customers to carry cash with them.
What you need is an account with a merchant services provider that allows online payments or offline credit card processing for brick and mortar clothing stores.
Getting the right credit card processing services
You’ll need a credit card processing service that fits the kind of clothing store you have. Here are the options.
Brick and Mortar clothing store
You’ll need a Retail Merchant Account. This account comes with hardware and software that would allow you to swipe customer credit cards in your clothing store POS terminal. Most merchant service providers provide the necessary hardware for free and charge you every month for its use, including the use of software. Charge.com offers free POS terminals to all its merchant customers who require them. See ourPOS terminals page for more details.
Online clothing store
You’ll need the services offered by an Internet merchant account. Also called an Internet gateway or eCommerce payment gateway, this credit card processing service allows your customers to pay their clothing orders to you online — on your ecommerce website. In some cases, this service also includes the ability to accept eChecks.
Your Internet gateway should be able to integrate with your online shopping cart program. Online clothing store shopping carts should have a sizing suggestion feature allowing previous customers to rate how each clothes item actually fits.
Check to see if the Internet gateway you’re considering also offers a web-based Virtual Terminal for manual card processing.
Over the phone clothing store
Having a web-based virtual terminal is a must for clothing store sales over the phone. This way, you will be able to process payments via an electronic keypad on any computer with Internet access. You can even print out invoices from the virtual terminal. Our Virtual Terminal package also includes free software that allows you to accept checks you receive over the Web, phone, mail, or fax. See our mail and phone credit card processing solutions for more details.
On the road situations
If you happen to find yourself selling your clothes at a trade show, or delivering your clothes to customers who don’t have cash but have credit or debit cards, the ability to process credit/debit card payments with a smartphone comes in handy. That’s where mobile and wireless credit card processing comes in. This includes wireless credit card terminals and our web-based Virtual Terminal. See Mobile & Wireless Credit Card Processing for more information.
At Charge.com, for every clothing store situation, we offer a credit card processing solution that applies.