Shopping with card is delightful
The experience of shopping with no cash on you is just exciting and it does make you feel cool and smart. It was such as delightful feeling, when I entered a shop right here in Ghana, in the capital to be precise, shopped and took out my local debit card, which we love to call ATM card and paid for the items.
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What made it such a good feeling was that I saw a long-sought-after item at a very good price and though I did not have enough cash to pay for it, I was able to pay with my card.
But for the fact that it was now possible to pay with a debit card (local), I would have had to go searching for a banking hall on a hot pay-day afternoon, because I had exhausted my limits from the ATM machine. What a great feeling it was! This is a feeling I think many more can enjoy, if we gave ourselves the chance of trying something new. Technology is lovely, once you get closer to it and experience it.
The frown and look of frustration when you visit the ATM and you see the post “out of order”, can safely be put behind us, because thanks to technology, you can go directly to the shop and pay with the card.
If people without cash on them can make a purchase, when on the spell of the moment they discover something they badly need, then I wonder why shop owners are not rushing for these POSes.
Because really, the days where people could not spend at your shop because they had no cash on them, are long gone, except you are refusing to take advantage of the technology.
If I owned a shop, not only will I display the POS so obviously, but I will also advertise visibly in my shop that “Here you can buy even if you don’t have the cash.”
The POS or the ability to pay using non cash-forms, is a sales booster. Look at the number of times, people could not buy something they badly needed from your shop simply because they did not have enough cash on them. You cannot continue to lose such clients when technology has given you a solution.
Having a technology and maximising its usage are two different things and I think many of us are guilty of underutilising available technology. There are several people with very sophisticated mobile phones and we do love to get them, but we barely use the tons of applications on them. The story is not different with electronic payment options.
Point of sale platforms
Today, it can be safely said that we have functioning technology that allows cards to be swiped on POSes, and this is applicable to both propriety (local) cards and foreign-branded cards, though on separate POSes. However, the dominant POS, christened the gh-link hybrid POSes, accept all proprietary cards as well as the e-zwich card and I know that in the near future this hybrid POS will be able to accept the foreign-branded cards as well.
But, while I am happy to be carrying around fewer cash and using my proprietary card, getting more people to do the same is of interest to me and of course the entire economy.
On a personal note, because fewer people pay with cards, the delivery of service is sometimes tardy as the attendants use them sparingly. I am also sure my ‘holy’ village shop is yet to secure a POS, because it is not ‘trendy’.
So getting a few more of us using non-cash forms of payment, could make a lot of difference. Some promotional activities by the card issuers, POS acquirers, as well as shop owners and other key stakeholders, could also make a lot of difference.
In some countries, you have access to discounts when shopping with the card and the discount is even extended to cover other services you opt for, such as restaurants, hotel accommodation, as well as freebies here and there.
I have discovered something exciting about shopping with cards and I hope you have to, but because of the huge benefits that would accrue to us, at both the micro and macro levels, I think there is a need for a more deliberate effort to get a critical mass on board and ensure the system works smoothly.
Benefits
Definitely, the economy benefits from using cards to shop and thus reducing cash transactions and their attendant huge cost to the nation. Shopping is more convenient, there are fewer queues at the banking halls, less need for bank branch extension which should translate into lower banking cost.
Additionally, shops can afford to work late and restrict sales to card, as well as enjoy higher sales volume because customers can shop more (tongue in cheek), after all, one man’s expenditure is another’s income and a growth in either of them is a higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
It also works well for audit trail, our national security and better tracking of dirty money and I can go on and on and on...
We can certainly not eliminate cash from the system, at least not in the foreseeable future, but we can definitely reduce cash usage, but ‘cooler’ still, you can walk about with no cash and buy everything you want…..no hustle! — GB