VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Hey everybody! What’s up! It’s Justin Live from B2B Vault to payment technology podcast with your host, Allen Kopelman. We’ll provide you with educational information about the payments business, FinTech, decentralized finance, and the technology businesses used in today’s world.
And in today’s podcast, we’ll discuss small businesses and mobile payments. There are many ways you could get paid as a small business owner. Now, people are using PayPal, Square, and Stripe cash app, you name it. There are lots of different ways to get paid. So, we’re here to educate businesses on the other more traditional ways of getting paid, you could say, right? Yeah! Like every morning, I start off my day. I walk Rocky early in the morning, and this morning I was scrolling through Facebook, and I came across this reel, had a really cool song by this guy. I’ll butcher his name LOUYAH.
But if you go to Rocky, B2B Vault mascot on Instagram, I’ll share it on the B2B Vault page. Okay! A little real, and he has like a cool song, and I was listening to him. I go, wow, it’s really cool. It’s uplifting. It’s a good song. And the guy said he was number four on iTunes. I’ve never even heard of him. It’s amazing with like social media, right? Yeah. All of a sudden, boom somebody’s discovered. The same thing, like people I hear from people all the time, they’re like, oh, I. I get messages on LinkedIn. Oh, I checked out your podcast. It was really cool! We’re working with a couple of clients right now and that’s how they found us through the podcast.
Very nice. So, it’s, it’s really interesting, so I always like to talk about small business and what is a small business? People don’t get it! Like a small business can be, anything can be your side hustle. Can be a business you run out of your house, could be a mobile business that you run before you even get it. And it’s very popular now, not even to have an office. I think the pandemic really accelerated. People into a small business. A lot of people now are like left their job, decided, hey, I’m going to start a small business. I’m going to go out and, create a business online, with a website or, I’m going to provide a service, whatever that service is and go out and get my customers. And then you got to deal with payments. Payments are a piece of your business that you really need to look at. And I always try to tell people, I go, if you have a quality payment method that you’re using with your customers depend depends on what you’re selling.
But if you want to look professional, you need to get it, you need to work with something professional. People might look at a business and go, they take PayPal payments, and they might look at that. Yeah, man! I’m tired of walking into a business and you take my card, and you swipe it on your phone and it like, you’re like, oh no, it didn’t go through. I need your card again. Those days are over. I’m not doing that anymore. If you haven’t, stepped it up! I get it, there’s an entry-level over everything, right? Yeah! Always a starting point. There’s always that like we’ve said over time and time again in previous podcasts like there’s a more, better way of doing things.
But if you can make your business, look a little more professional. Absolutely! and get more business because then you won’t be, they’ll say, oh, this guy’s got a professional way to take credit cards. It’s professional, it looks professional! When I first started out. It smells professional! When I first started in web design, getting paid was, it was difficult, right? He didn’t have. You didn’t have all these other avenues that you could take now and get paid, back then it was, get a check, track the guy down! Get a check, get some cash, or you would use some sort of invoicing software, which would take 30 to 90 days to get paid sometimes.
Do you know what I mean? So yeah, figuring that all out is imperative. Yeah! But also, you want to take your business, right? To the, you want to take your business up a notch, right? So, take it up a notch, you can. By taking your business up a notch, you make your business look more professional, and more polished, even though it might not be right. There’s a, here are some good examples of, we’ve helped many businesses, people in startup mode, we’re helping a guy. Now they’re starting up an advertising company like online to help businesses like advertise using what was that? Alexa? Yeah!
And Siri and all this stuff, and they get your business listed on there. And that’s great for like your, a restaurant or a storefront, brick, and mortar. Yeah. You need that in a brick and mortar. So, they’re helping people set up to Google my business page too, which I and Justin have talked about numerous times in the podcast. Now we’re helping them with payments. So, they need regular payments for their merchant account, back away, you’re hitting something. Okay! And they also need to Buy Now Pay Later they want to offer that. So, people don’t so they can take away the price resistance. Because they got different packages.
So, with the Buy Now Pay Later, the customer can make four payments! But mobile payments come in many forms. And like I was recently reading the other day, I’ll tell you a story about mobile payments, and why it’s important. So, I forgot my wallet at the office, and I was out running an errand and I stopped for gas. I go, damn, no wallet. Thank God, I have my phone and I’ve apple pay! And the pump had the NFC reader on it. Oh, tap. So, I took my phone over there. Boom! I said, hey, it worked! And I was able to pay for gas with my phone. And I think we’re going to, you’re going to see more and more types of payments like that, where the phone is going to be instrumental.
Instrumental with payments! And also, I was reading where there’s like new radios coming out for cars. Probably Tesla will be the first one to do it., because they’re the most technologically advanced, or one of these electric car companies. They’ll come out with that where you’re going to be able to pay for stuff with your car. Oh, when you were talking about that last week, right? So, you’re going through the drive-through, you don’t want to be fumbling around for your wallet. And pulling it out and. Strapped in and you’re getting your wallet out, or you’re digging through your purse if you’re a woman. Right now, you might be able to just hit on your phone, boom, and send an NFC payment over to the drive-through at the restaurant.
Or you’re pulling up for a pickup at the pizza shop. That’s nice! There’s going to be, there’s a lot of advances coming, with that. And other types of mobile payments, people pay from a QR code. People paying through text, I always tell people like you don’t have to spend a lot of money. Like we’re now testing a platform where you can have a conversation with somebody through text and then send them an invoice, or a payment request, and they can pay their bill. Yeah. That’s really good. Yeah. And we’re going to launch that with the podcast soon, where you’re going to be able to text us, like the text to a phone, number, a word, and then get some information back from us.
So that’s something we’re experimenting with too. Email payments like Justin said, send somebody an invoice. Now you can go next level, send somebody an invoice with a link in it to make a payment. So that’s important, E-invoicing and email payment, using your phone as a terminal. So, like now they have new software coming out on the iPhone, where back here and on the Androids, there’s going to be an NFC chip! So, someone will be able to take their tap-to-pay card and tap it on the back of the phone. And you’ll be able to run a payment. That’s sketchy to me, but it’s coming. So, like you want to, I drop my wallet and then they pick up the card, and you tap it and now you’re robbing me. Yeah. Now it’s so easy to shut your card off if you lose your wallet. I’m not saying if you don’t know you lost your wallet. If you don’t know you lost your wallet, someone could take your card walking the best, buy and stick it into the machine too. So hopefully you catch it.
I don’t that just that’s I don’t like that one. Okay. I don’t know about the card tapping on the phone. Yeah, and phone to phone. Take your phone. I don’t know. I don’t know about it to me. It doesn’t like to me, I think the adopt just imagine like all the kids no, but I stole my mom’s phone and then they ran to the grocery store and then they bought $20 worth of candy. And then they put the phone back and then their mom’s I don’t know. That’s going to be a that’s a lot. No, but I’m to think of what I’m saying is I think the adoption of that is going to take a long time very long. Yeah. Because I think people especially are, and I’m older than you, but I think in the people like over 30 is not going to be like, so down with that, yeah.
I can see the phone to the tap. That’s one thing like paying right. You’re paying with your phone, but I’m just saying using the phone-to-phone thing is sketchy to me. And, you have all tapped the card to my phone, but now can get like the little square box that links to your phone. So, you open up the app on your phone, you just have your little dongle, and you stick the credit card in there, and Boom, you are running! Like we’re getting ready to launch a new product line of that. Which is going to be super, super affordable for merchants, like super affordable! It’s a, plus, you could use your, you could use like a full-blown credit card machine too that has a printer on it. It depends on if you have somebody paying you a thousand bucks for something right. Do you want to have a, spend the money, get the regular machine with 4g on it! It prints the professional receipt, or from the terminal, you can text or email it to the person.
You want to, you want to make your business look as professional as possible. Those types of investments for businesses are, are crucial, especially as far as growing I think small businesses we get; we tend to get stuck and it is just a way that we do things. It’s just a this is the way that we do it! This is the way we’ve been doing it, and so we don’t typically take technology and utilize it. That’s like I was telling you the story about the barber shop, this guy that. We know he has a barber shop and then they, we said, yeah, you can get this point of sale. It’s only $39 a month. The guy’s really come on. And we’re like, yeah, you got to have, and literally, their business is going trip their triple, triple the sales, since they put a point of sale in nice, they’re selling more products. They’re booking more appointments because they have all the tools now to track the employees, book appointments, and all of that to keep track of them.
So, it’s important to have the right kind of thing, for your business so people can get, they can pay you and they look at your business in a professional way. Hey, these guys have a professional payment method. And then the other thing is, today I tell everybody like when there, I was, I would say 80% of the small businesses, we sign up for credit card processing. And a small business is anybody doing under 5 million a month! I would tell you that 80% of those businesses are utilizing cash discounts, surcharges, and dual pricing where they’re passing a small fee to the customer, even if it’s only part of the fee and even big businesses. We had some attorneys, offices, and accountants, and they’re passing a 2%. Inflation is killing everybody! The price of gas, inflation, inflated, cost of goods. If you have a mobile business and you’re driving around, you’re a plumber, and now you’re paying $5 for gas.
Or almost $5 for gas and a year ago you were paying half of that, and now you’re got double the costs and, your labor costs are going up and so on and so forth. You want to be able to, you can only raise prices so much. So, using the cash discount features become very popular. We just set up a whole, a slew of places everybody’s doing the cash discount, and then the other thing is alternative payment methods. So one is, crypto, which you know, is not, is going to gain more popularity as time goes on. And I also think that I’ve been reading a lot about stablecoins and people starting to adopt stablecoin as a way to do payments. And I think that’s going to be very interesting. I was reading about a couple of cities that wanted to start accepting stablecoin.
Really! I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but it was an interesting article that I was reading about stablecoins. And I see, there was even a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Talking about Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, and like how they’re doing as far as the metaverse and NFTs and crypto! Right! They’re probably, they’re positioning themselves to see is there going to be something happening where they’re going to do a play? But they’re positioning themself that if it looks viable, they already have something in place. And the other thing is, even for small businesses, Buy Now Pay Later, is a great option!
Like I was telling you the new advertising company, they’re trying to sell people stuff for 299, 499. It’s a one-time service setup fee to do that stuff. The business might say I don’t have the money right now. Oh, we can have this Buy Now Pay Later, break it up into four payments, it’s awesome, that’s a good thing. It’s an awesome thing to have! Technology can make your business, the perception of your business. Give a better perception of your business. You, make your business look more legit or legitimate, to customers. Right!
Because people, now they go check everything. People always ask me, they go, oh, how do people find you? People go and they check out your LinkedIn profile. They go check out. Like today I was trying to set up an appointment with somebody and I talked to them on the phone. And the next thing I know, I looked, and they sent me a, they looked at my LinkedIn. So, people look at your LinkedIn, they’re looking at your better business bureau. They’re looking you up on Google and that’s why you got to, you got to make your business look as professional as possible! You can do a lot of it yourself might not look the greatest, but you can.
There are a lot of tools for businesses to use and do stuff themselves now. When I started out in business, they didn’t have a tool like Canva. Like Canva, where you can make art and it helps you size it for social media and stuff like that. , they didn’t even have a tool like that. If you weren’t a professional graphic designer, you really didn’t have, you could just put some crappy-looking pictures. Yep! That’s what it is, that’s what it is. And, small businesses need to, you need to come up with ways to make your business, the perception of it look as big as possible by having, at least LinkedIn, Facebook set up, and Google my business set up.
We talk about that. We did a lot of, we’ve done a lot of podcasts about small business and how to position your small business and things you should have with your small business and, setting up a website. And perception is 50, is important, very important. Having a professional payment method, like even for me, like I have guys that come to my house to like to mow the lawn and they want they’re like, oh, you have cash. I’m like, I didn’t even know you guys are coming. I don’t have, I don’t have cash, I’m not going to run to the ATM either. Gimme your phone number. I’ll sell you, I’ll Zelle you, but they would probably get more jobs. If they would have a professional, hey, I’ll take your credit card. Boom, they run it.
They could probably charge more too. Yes. Absolutely because people will pay more because they go, that guy’s actually running a business. It’s not treating it like, a hustle. Yeah. Like a side hustle. You got to when you’re ready to take your side hustle to the next level, check out other podcasts that we’ve done about small business and things you should do with your business. About marketing your small business and all of that, check it all out! And you want to get set up with a new payment method for your small business. Get in touch with us on Spotify. What your we can. Yeah. You can listen to us on Spotify. We’re available on every streaming platform you can possibly think of.
You could check us out on YouTube and shout out to all the new subscribers on YouTube. There’s a contest going on right now. You would be seeing more info about that through we’ll put the link in the show notes excuse me. And then you could follow us on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at B2B Vault. Be sure to follow us, subscribe to the channel, and like the YouTube videos for us to comment on. Any questions that you have. Head over to B2BVault.info. If you like to get in touch with Allen, there’s also a form there for you. If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast and you can also apply for a Merchant Account there hit the Apply Button, and then we’ll get in touch with you and discuss your business needs.
We’ll always give a free 15-minute consultation to help you out with your business. So, you can either book an appointment or ask for an appointment or fill out the application either way. You’re going to get our time and we’ll help you get set up with something for your business, something that’ll meet your budget and make your business look cool! With cool technology, use technology and make your business cool! There you go. I know. I’m not that cool. Justin’s cool. No, I’m not that cool. Whatever.
But yeah, so thank you for listening to today’s podcast about small businesses and mobile payments. Peace Out! Carpe Diem! Everybody, have a great day! Follow us and share our posts on social media and enter the contest!
