Yesterday Billboard Insider asked readers if they pass credit card fees on to out of home advertisers who pay with a credit card.  52% of Billboard Insider readers say that they do.  41% of Billboard Insider readers don’t.  7% of Billboard Insider readers don’t take credit cards in payment of out of home ad contracts.

A northeast out of home executive tells Billboard Insider that his company added credit card fees over the past year: “We added fees about a year ago. 3%. We put the language on our contracts to make sure we were transparent about the policy.  So far so good. We’re also building a portal to process these payments more securely. So many businesses are adding cc fees, that we felt it was becoming common place.”

Another executive tells Billboard Insider that you need to give clients adequate lead time of the change: “When we decided on this initiative, we gave our clients that paid by credit card ample lead time to prepare for the policy change.  We had very minimal push back from Advertisers.  For the very few Advertisers that had some angst about the change, we worked with them to ease their transition.   Also, it had no effect on our accounts receivables, as a few had feared.”

Credit card fees can be big for a small business says a third out of home executive: “I have been internally wrestling with this for the last 3 years!  Currently we pay the fee which is costing us approximately 50K a year.

A west coast out of home executive makes the case for not passing thru fees: “We absorb the fee currently with the idea we are happy to be getting paid. saving time and energy collecting slow pays needs to be considered. We could almost call it breaking even saving the time from collecting rent.”

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