Practitioner or Therapist?
Professional therapists are experts at the service they provide, but often find asking for payment difficult. 1Epay makes that part easy.
Questions Answered
Why take payments online?
You have trained, studied, and practised for years; but did anyone teach you about managing your client payments? It's the one part of your business you're not an expert in. Setting up online payments makes appointment booking easy for you and your clients, smooths out your cashflow, and reduces cancellations.
Why not use PayPal?
Some people love PayPal, but some really don't. Why miss orders from them? There's also the point that PayPal's fees are quite high at 3.4% plus 20p per transaction (see the calculation lower down). A payment system from a reputable payment gateway and merchant account provider will cost a lot less than that. Finally, if a disgruntled customer contacts PayPal they can freeze your account until the issue is sorted out. Other people will still buy things from your site, but you can't receive any funds at all. Having said that, after a number of years trading without any problems PayPal may relax that rule. It can be well over five years. A frozen PayPal account can seriously harm, or even kill a small business.
Do I need a card machine?
No, the entire transaction is done online. If you want to take payments over the phone most payment gateways have virtual terminals that enable this. In addition they often provide methods of sending payment links and pages where a customer can enter their card details in person.
Do I need a web developer to set up a payments system for me?
You don't need a web developer. If you already have a website there are simple plugins to enable payments. If not then there are pre made pages and webapps for you to use.
Client Stories
Omar
As a sports physiotherapist Omar is completely focussed on treating his clients injuries and getting them out on the track again...
A love of sport led Omar to a degree course in sports physiotherapy at his local college.
After a few years gaining experience he set up on his own with a space in a gym and health club.
To begin with people would ring his mobile and he'd fit their bookings into the slots in his appointments book. At the end of each session he would take payments in cash, or using a low cost payments app/card reader.
But Omar had two constant niggles and one big problem; the first two were the usual thing with people cancelling at the last minute or not turning up. When either of these happened he didn't have time to allocate the slot to another client.
The third happened when he dropped his phone and it stopped working. It took a few days for him to get a new one and transfer his number.
He lost a few clients, but nothing too serious. But most of his clients were used to paying by card. Over the days until his phone was replaced he didn't have the app, so could only accept cash. When that happened he just asked people to send payments through online banking, bring cash later, or pay him next time.
It was a hassle, he had to contact people to remind them they hadn't paid. Some never did and he didn't see them again.
Omar's cashflow dropped by 30%. He knew he'd get most of it back eventually, but he had his rent to pay to the gym, as well as his own wages to pay.
He realised he needed a more robust method to solve those three issues. The answer was using 1Epay to set up regular payments, taking deposits for bookings, and having a system that worked independently of hos phone.
Melanie
It was always her dream to be help women find success...
She drifted through school and university but always felt she could be doing more...
Having studied business economics Melanie had a good grasp of what made big companies successful, and helped a few in the first few years of her career.
Then after leaving work to have her children she discovered first hand how difficult it can be trying to reenter the workforce.
Melanie had always believed in equal rights and opportunities but had discovered an area where she saw inequality: women who had a desire to succeed, started their own business, and then struggled to achieve the success they sought.
This is where Melanie's interest and expertise met. She had seen a number of goups on social media where female entrepreneurs congregated to share support and experience to help each other.
After helping a number of women turn their buisnesses around she realised how she could help herself while helping others.
Now Melanie is a business consultant who assists small business people (mainly women) understand their market, the economics and drivers, and hearts and souls of the businesses they've founded. Taking this she works with these people over the weeks and months to turn marginal enterprises into highly profitable concerns.
When she set up Melanie devised her own plan, and that included organising her cashflow to be rock solid. Simple, safe, and low cost.
Better still, she wanted to have someone she could call on the phone who could advise and help, especially while she was setting up - that led her to 1Epay.