Member Article

Is business ready to go cashless?

One simple item is leading a lot of retailers to miss out on a lot of spend - a card payment terminal.

Research from one of the major banks last month revealed that 58% of small businesses still don’t let their customers pay by card – even in the face of competition from high street chains and out of town malls.

This comes at a time when cash use continues to fall - down 14% in the past five years according to the British Retail Consortium – while at the same time spending on cards topped £0.5TRILLION in 2013 (UK Cards Association).

So, on Saturday June 21, 2014, we chose a street full of independent traders in Manchester to become the UK’s first cashless street, for a day as a social experiment to gauge the reaction of business owners and shoppers to a cashless society.

Beech Road in south Manchester is typical of many UK high streets – there is a newsagent, deli, bars, restaurants, takeaways, bakery, clothes and gift shops. The fact they are all independents is what made them the natural testing ground for our idea.

Small business owners tell Handepay that the reason they don’t accept cards is that they think it will be too expensive, a hassle or too complicated.

However, this is way that customers want to pay - and that cannot be ignored. Especially when this road doesn’t even have an ATM.

On our cashless day, the traders reported an average increase in turnover of 22%, as they conducted an average of 28% more card transactions than normal.

The public were keen to engage in the experiment and share their views on cash versus cards. 53% said they would shop locally more often if they knew every shop took cards, while 60% said they had left a shop in the past as the option to pay by card wasn’t available. On average, these shoppers use their plastic 2.5 times a day – and the average amount of cash they had in their purses and wallets was £19. Only 43% thought that we were ready for a cashless society.

That’s OK - we never expected that we would discover we’re ready to give up cash just yet. But we are delighted that so many independent businesses took the opportunity to engage their customers about how they like to spend.

The future for the local high street is in making it as easy as possible for customers to shop there rather than lose business to a chain store, supermarket or a retail park/mall. That’s what the cashless street was all about.

For more information and to see videos and pictures from the cashless street, go to www.handepay-cashless-street.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Handepay .