Have recent developments in the South African political and economic spheres been keeping you up at night, led to emergency strategy meetings or stopped you from expanding your business? This month, the WAPPoint team are focused on helping business owners to find ways to overcome the disaster in the economy and turn this into potentially bigger profits!

How junk status affects you and your business:

1. A slow progression of interest rate hikes will occur over time. This means that if you have any loans i.e. property, vehicle, personal or business, the interest rates would cause these loan repayment amounts to increase. This means that you will have less spending power available.
2. Commodities like food and transport will increase over time. Because most businesses rely on transporting their goods to retail outlets or importing and exporting goods, this means that not only will you pay more for food and petrol but many companies are forced to increase their prices due to their newly incurred costs. This ends up making most products and services more expensive which raises the overheads in your business.
3. Consumers, due to the first two points will have less spending power. The danger for your business is that if your products or services do not offer enough value for consumers to prioritize buying it, you could face dire straits.

The good news however, is that all of this will happen over a number of months or years so now is the perfect time for you to begin taking action so that these potential losses can turn into your best business years instead.

Here are four ways that you can achieve this and how we as your merchant service and card payment solutions can help you:

1. Do your research before committing to a supplier:

What you see is not always what you get. For years, most business owners assumed their bank would be the best supplier of merchant services but this is a thing of the past. With so many card facility service providers out there today, it’s easy to choose the one with the lowest quote but this could end up costing your business so much more each month. Many of them don’t clearly explain the hidden minimum turnover requirements or minimum service fees and these could run from R250 to a couple of thousands extra per month.  Switching to a tried and tested service provider that offers you tangible benefits with no hidden costs is the way to go. Take a look at these reasons that make WAPPoint the best card payment provider for your business.

2. Choose service providers that allow you flexibility to upgrade or downgrade as your needs change:

It does not help to pay exorbitant prices when you don’t need to. Great service providers are the ones who are adaptable to your business needs. Technology has revolutionised the card payments industry in the last few years and this has caused an influx of mobile card reader or card payment app service providers to appear on the market. Unfortunately many of these only offer one device and this may not cater for your business in the long run or you could have gone with a bank which does not offer any mobile payment solution yet. You could be saving more than R5000 per year on rental fees alone by switching to WAPPoint and opting for our PocketPOS^TM card reader or you could be losing customers if you are only providing card app payment solutions where customers have to do the transaction themselves. Click here to get a WAPPoint PocketPOS^TM.

3. Open New Revenue Streams:

Get innovative about your business. What makes you different? What value does your business add to society and why would someone continue buying your product / service when times are tough? Identifying this can transform your business and open up a world of possibilities. As an example in our business, for years we stayed away from targeting retailers in malls because we thought that we couldn’t compete with the banks’ prices. After realising our differences and what we bring to the market in terms of value, we realised that it was easy to compete and win! One of these factors include providing reporting which not many banks provide and which retailers desperately struggle with as till point sales and card sales need to be matched up daily. There are so many more but by discovering our value, we began to generate new revenue streams. As an Entrepreneur, you are sales orientated by nature and need to look at ways of reducing overheads without pouring thousands of Rands into research and development of new offerings so this is one way of doing just that. Also, did you know that you could cover your merchant service costs by simply referring businesses to WAPPoint! Get R200 cash back as a WAPPoint client every time one of your referrals signs up with us!

Grow Your Online Presence:

Not having an online presence in this day and age is simply the fastest way to limit your business potential. Offering your service online is also quickly becoming a standard and entrepreneurs who do not innovate their online presence are losing out on a huge potential client base! If you cannot afford a website just yet, creating a Facebook page at the very least is key to bringing in consumers from places you cannot be in person and online marketing is so affordable in comparison to selling door to door or one on one. Besides this, setting up and maintaining a website or Facebook page is easy for anyone to do or learn to do with amazing tutorials all over the internet. Making money while you sleep is the best part of this equation as WAPPoint offers affordable eCommerce, M-Commerce and other online payment solutions that easily integrate with your website or Facebook page so that every sale is closed without much effort on your part. Accept payments online from only R49pm.

As entrepreneurs your focus must be on staying ahead of the curve through innovation and understanding your customers! Only the most unique and innovative businesses will be able to flourish in tougher economic environments.

What is Junk Status?

Junk status is a term associated with the quality score given to bonds originating from SA. When credit ratings agencies; Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poors (S&P) downgrade our perceived investment quality status, they impact investor confidence. This leads to a reduction in Foreign Direct Investment which is critical to our economy and is needed to fund our ever growing expenses. In short, it raises the cost of debt for the country as a whole and slows GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth which leads to reduced purchasing power for consumers and higher overheads for businesses.

Why is a Merchant Service Provider talking about Junk Status?

Our vision is simple, we want to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Small – Medium Entrepreneurs create jobs in our economy and generate a lot of the economic wealth in SA. If these businesses survive, our economy will too. WAPPoint is a credit and debit card payment solutions provider like no other. We are 100% service driven and our motivation comes from seeing our customers thrive. In order to do that, we need to help each other grow by sharing our insights and giving advice to the masses that are fighting tooth and nail to get ahead.

By switching to WAPPoint and sharing this blog with other entrepreneurs, more and more South Africans can grow their businesses and get our economy back on track!

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