What method of payment – cash, card, or house charge – do you deal with most?

We have a pretty healthy group of house charges, about 25 percent. Credit cards are probably around 55 percent. And we do take debit cards. We're supposed to ask and we do, every time, but we don't get a lot of requests, as there aren't that many that do debit. By far the most people just go ahead and do the regular credit card charge. We lump cash and checks together for the rest, but there's definitely more checks than cash. We don't really have a lot of problems with any of them. Except maybe not collecting promptly on the in-house charges. We send out monthly bills, and find that we do have to repeat the billing. We have two or three bad checks a year but we don't, knock on wood, really have a bad check problem.

Our sales are 65 percent credit cards, 35 percent cash, and barely 1 percent checks. Off the top of my head I can think of three checks that bounced, and we were able to collect on all of them. These days almost everyone uses those check/ATM/MasterCard things. It's nice because I don't want to say no to a customer and this removes the worry. However, one time with a credit card, the code "call credit card company" came up. I did, and they said, "Is the customer in front of you? Cut up the card." The husband, who shared a joint card with his wife, was glaring at her. Apparently, she'd lost her card, reported it missing, but had forgotten to tell him. We also charge separately for shipping, and although we remind customers of this, we once had someone forget and query it as a double charge.

I would say that 30 percent are checks, 60 percent are credit cards (including debit cards), and 10 percent cash. We do layaways for people, and we are even happy to divide out a single order among three or four separate invoices. I always say we accept everything except the Discover card and firstborn male babies. We have problems with maybe two or three checks a year, but it's normally with checks for custom orders, where a 50 percent deposit is required. I've never had a case where both the deposit and the final payment checks were bad. I rarely have a problem with cash. I've had a few credit cards declined. In the worst case, we had to run four different cards before we found the one that went through. I feel very fortunate.

We take MasterCard and Visa credit and debit cards, which make up 77 percent of our dollars. Cash is 14 percent, and personal checks are 9 percent. We've never had a counterfeit bill passed, at least to our knowledge. We get maybe six returned checks a year, but our customers are usually really good about it: They notify us before we even get it back from the bank. In seven and a half years we've only had one charge back. Unfortunately it was a doozy: about $1,200. It was a fraudulent credit card produced by a ring operating in the Toronto area. We hadn't exactly followed all the regulations on the processing of credit cards so we ended up eating that one, but that was our only significant loss. We've had good luck and a good clientele.