Why The *&^!% Aren’t You Accepting Credit Card Payments For Your Tournaments?
Dear tournament and/or league director:
I’m over it.
If I walk into one more tournament where you ask me to pay by cash, I might just throw up all over the nearest pool table.
I missed being a millennial by 2 years (I won’t tell you exactly how old I am — feel free to do the math yourself). But that doesn’t mean I have any less aversion to paperwork, paper airplanes, or anything else that has to do with paper, including paper money.
No, I don’t want to carry around a wad of $20 bills that is probably laden with cocaine or has been in the dirty sock drawer of a bouncer named Biff in order to satisfy your inner hunger to get paid with cash.
No, I don’t want to pay a $2.50 ATM fee in order to withdraw $20 to play in some competition, when I can just as easily use my credit card to pay for practice time at the counter of a pool hall.
No, I don’t want to park my car in the ghetto where I have to cross my fingers and hope that I don’t get mugged while pulling cash out of the ATM to pay the $15 entry fee in your Monday night 9-ball tournament.
I want convenience. I want to be able to pull out my credit card just one time, enter the info into an app on my phone, and never have to worry about physically carrying cash or credit again.
I want to be able to use my credit card, where I get 1.5% cash back on all purchases, for everything that I do. From buying groceries at Safeway to playing in the local 8-ball tournament at XYZ bar.
And most of all, I want you to make my life easier for me by letting me find, register, and pay for leagues and tournaments right from my phone with a tap of a button.
I’m sorry, but I also don’t care that you have to pay 3% of my tournament entry in the form of fees. I expect that you either:
A) suck it up as a cost of doing business with me.
or
B) that you simply raise the tournament entry fee by 3% to cover this cost. I’d gladly pay $20.60 for my tournament entry fee to not have to deal with the hassle of paying cash.
And I know that there are other players out there just like me. In fact, I would venture to guess that there are exactly 147 other players just here in San Francisco who think like me.
A bit of an odd number for me to just throw out there, I know. Well that number happens to be the number of players that paid by credit card in the first 15 ZenSports tournaments that they’ve run here in the Bay area. That represents a whopping 35.3% of all player entries that were paid by credit card.
35.3%. In just 6 weeks. 147 out of a total of 416 players.
But it gets better. 36.8% of all entry fee dollars were collected by credit card in that same amount of time. $3,055 out of $8,925 were paid by credit card. Right from the player’s phone. No thinking. No cash. Just tapping a button.
The numbers are similar for tournaments run by other directors through the ZenSports app. This is the wave of the future, and players have spoken.
I know, I know. You’re probably thinking that most of these 147 players would have played anyways if they were required to pay by cash. You’re probably thinking that it’s still not worth the 3% fee to take credit cards for your tournaments. You’re probably thinking that you’ll always have a line out the door of players who are waiting to play in your tournaments, regardless of how difficult you make their lives.
But now that there are other tournaments being run out there that do offer the ability to pay by credit card, are you really as safe as you originally thought?
