Second-hand furniture shop: a community case study
Profile:
This community case study, describes a second-hand furniture shop and registered charity in East Anglia. They wanted to improve their customer service by taking debit and credit cards, but couldn’t decide how best to go about it.
The issues:
The shop’s bank wouldn’t provide them with a Chip & PIN terminal unless they agreed to at least a five-year contract and on deeper investigation, it appeared that the terminal (and the associated transaction costs) mighty be prohibitively expensive.
The Cardsave Community solution:
Like many second-hand furniture shops, this one had recently seen an increase in demand for quality second-hand furniture and electrical appliances. However, the shop knew they were losing sales by not being able to offer credit and debit card facilities.
Cardsave Community’s Relationship Manager visited and talked through the options. The customer was delighted to find out that Cardsave Community offers a contract for a minimum of only 12 months, so they were not tied into a lengthy contract. Cardsave Community’s extremely competitive rates, designed especially for third sector, not-for-profit organisations and NGOs was also attractive.
Conclusion:
Having decided it was the right solution, Cardsave Community took care of the administration and the community furniture store was up and running in days. The store has now found that the majority of their customers prefer to pay by card – and sales are up significantly.
