Integrate Gift Cards With Your POS Software

It seems like gift cards have taken a bad rap in this recession period. Everyone is afraid that the company they bought the card from will not be in business by the time the card is redeemed. Nothing could be farther from the truth from most companies. U.S. shoppers bought gift cards in just about every type of retail store and shopping center the holiday season before this one and spent a record $27.8 billion on the plastic presents, according to the National Retail Federation. By mid-January, though, their recipients had redeemed fewer than half – 37.3 percent – the trade group said. That was 07 and 08 was way off because of the economy. This will change again and you need to be ready for the big gift card explosion.

Business is too hard to come by to let those dollars slip away. The extra cash in the drawer is a perfect reason to put a gift card program into your retail outlet. Not only is this gift card income, money you get to use interest free, but a majority of gift card users spend more than the balance on the gift card and portions of the balance are never used at all. ProphetLine POS Software builds a gift card program into their product through their credit card processing partner, Mercury Payment Systems. If you use the credit and debit card functions of Mercury, you incur no transaction fees on the gift card usage. Another way, quality POS software will improve your business.