There’s a chemistry that happens when a customer pays for a product or service. The smoothness of the transaction – money going one way and a product going the other – adds to or detracts from the buying experience. We have all suffered the silent panic of a card not working or a payment bouncing at the till. As the person on the other end it can be easy to forget how much the experience of that moment can colour your customers’ perception of your business.
The launch of Yoco Tap ensures an even more convenient, safer and faster experience for your customers at your till point.
What is Yoco Tap?
Yoco Tap is a new feature on the Wireless Pro card machine that allows your customers to pay for smaller purchases with a simple touch on the machine with their tap enabled cards or Samsung and FNB enabled phones. All they have to do is wait for the four lights at the top to light up and the transaction is done.
The need for speed
Speed is the key benefit of Tap – especially for high traffic businesses like coffee shops and quick service food vendors. The enemy here is twofold: less speed, less sales and time in the queue is time to reconsider for customers.
Case in point: the always-shorter ‘other’ queue at the grocery store. Does it matter to you that not much time may have passed or does it matter more that others are getting faster service. Or consider two scenarios: waiting to pay for your coffee on a lazy Sunday morning versus waiting to pay on a Monday morning when you are late for a meeting. It may take the same time, but the experience is different.
Any waiting time puts distance between the decision to buy and the act of doing of it. Grocery stores try distract you from the wait with shelves of impulse buys (where you’ll sometimes find the discards of someone who changed their mind), but the root of the problem is still the slow till at the end. With a tap of a card you can offer your customers a smoother experience – and more sales for you.
How does it work?
Near Field Communication (NFC) allows your customers to make contactless payments using NFC-enabled MasterCard or Visa cards. These types of cards will have the symbol below on them to show that they have this capability. Customers can also use Samsung or FNB Pay on their mobile phones to make payments.
If they don’t have an NFC-enabled card, the normal method of paying will still work.
But is it safe…
Yoco Tap is as secure as regular chip card payments, with the added benefits that Yoco merchants have zero liability protection. Any unauthorised transactions are covered by this protection.
So what happens next?
Over the last two months we have been slowly rolling out this feature through a software update to our merchants with a Pro card machine. This phased rollout has successfully upgraded more than 2 000 customers onto Tap, with more than R7m in NFC transactions being processed to date. The phased roll out has been vital to minimise disruption to our customers, and will continue over the next few weeks until all Pro card machines are Tap enabled.
Update: We now have two tap enabled card machines: the Yoco Go and the Yoco Pro. To learn more about these machines please visit our credit card machine page.
