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FFLs Can Increase Sales by Selling at Gun Shows Using Integrated Mobile Payments
June 19, 2024 / 8 minute read / By AltruPay (Guest Blogger)
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Recent studies show nearly 10% of all new gun purchases occur in one of these qualified industry off-site events and venues. Successfully selling outside your traditional retail location, is a growing opportunity for FFLs. Having a presence at trade shows, 4473 qualifying charity events, pop-ups, and any other opportunity is a must for firearm retailers.
But because firearms businesses are prohibited from using many of the largest mobile payments platforms and many 2A-friendly credit card processors don’t offer easy-to-use mobile payments, many FFLs avoid accepting integrated credit and debit card payments outside of their retail setting. Consequently, they avoid gun shows and 4473-qualifying events altogether due to the hassle and security risks of accepting cash or use non-integrated providers that prohibit firearms businesses, hoping to avoid getting flagged and having their funds frozen.
In recent years, however, the rise of innovative firearms payment processors have made accepting credit cards outside the retail setting that integrate with their mobile point of sale system seamless and simple for FFLs. So, if you haven’t made accepting integrated payments outside your retail store location part of your firearms business’ growth plans, we’re going to lay out a few business reasons why you might want to jump aboard.
Gun shows are growing, with large shows reporting 10-15% year over year attendance growth.
Consequently, each year they represent a bigger and bigger opportunity to grow your business’ sales and customer base. In fact, the National Institute of Justice estimates that between 4-9% of all firearm sales in the United States take place at gun shows.
Exhibiting but not accepting plastic at sanctioned shows means retailers miss out on sales. Studies uniformly show that retailers who accept credit and debit compared to cash, increase their average ticket by 12-18% and close 35% more sales (Dun & Bradstreet). If you’re going to grow your business through gun shows, accepting integrated mobile credit and debit card payments are a requirement for success.
An increasingly popular way for FFL retailers to reach new customers is by setting up temporary, or pop-up, shops at different 4473 qualifying banquets and events that are sponsored by organizations devoted to firearms collection, competitive or other sporting use. Being on-location creates a sense of novelty and exclusivity that generates a higher percentage of impulse purchases, purchase rates, and sales of higher margin products, all of which can increase daily offsite sales by 35% over a traditional retail setting, according to a study by Storefront.
Attempting to close high ticket impulse purchases, which, by definition, means the customer hasn’t spent the time to gather the hard cash to make the purchase, while only accepting cash is a recipe for failure. Consequently, accepting integrated firearms mobile credit card payments with your mobile point of sale at applicable off-site events is essential to making this a successful growth channel.
Setting up shop outside of your typical four retail walls for any reason provides for enhanced brand visibility, in part, because it introduces your brand to potential customers who don’t drive by the brick and mortar location regularly.
But perhaps more importantly, setting up shop at 4473-qualifying charitable events actually changes the lens through which your firearms brand is seen. Rather than the customer seeing your brand as just another local gun shop or a firearms website, a brand that sets up a temporary shop at an annual shooting charity event that the customer also supports, for instance, is now seen in a completely different light.
87% of consumers said they would purchase a product because a company supported a cause they cared about, according to a survey by Cone Communication,
But to complete that transformative brand perception, you need to provide a streamlined sales process, which means the ability to accept integrated mobile credit card payments is a necessary component for success at charity events.
Recently, FFLs faced a dilemma when selling outside their usual retail or eCommerce channels. They either accepted cash or reluctantly used non-integrated payment systems that didn’t welcome them as customers.
Both options have drawbacks: security concerns for cash transactions and inconvenience with non-integrated systems.
Sell a lot of a single product at a gun show or pop-up 4473-qualifying charity event? That’s great, but if it takes a team member a few days to manually update the inventory after the show is over, you may have created more headaches than it’s worth, from unfulfillable sales to supply chain delays that end up costing you other customers.
By accepting integrated mobile payments, however, you ensure that your inventory is updated in near real-time, which ensures that the additional sales you generate through these venues aren’t offset by additional headaches and inventory management related lost sales.
Accepting cash or card payments through a non-integrated point of sale and mobile payments provider at events often means that your email campaigns and loyalty programs that help turn first-time customers into repeat customers don’t actually happen.
It’s possible to manually add back sales into your system after a show concludes, but the reality for most busy retailers is that when they come back from an event they’re scrambling to put out other fires and the manual uploads don’t end up happening.
With integrated mobile payments, however, you can ensure more of your gun show or pop-up sales into long term clientele through the power of your customer loyalty system because the sales automatically integrate with your existing Celerant loyalty programs.
Firearms related businesses can drive an estimated 10-15% in new sales this year, by expanding their presence at venues such as trade shows, pop-ups and charity events, and accepting offsite POS system integrated mobile credit and debit card payments when at those events.
Retailers using Celerant’s retail POS system can start accepting integrated mobile payments by reaching out to your Celerant account rep or Tactical Payments.
Tactical Payments, is a leader in ACH, debit and credit card processing for the firearms, archery and tactical industries. A division of AltruPay, Tactical Payments offers retail, mobile, phone and eCommerce payment solutions, industry leading rates, award winning Texas based customer service, and is fully integrated with Celerant.