Small Merchants Gain in Card-Based Sales, Though State And City Make a Big Difference

Month by month, U.S. merchants are steadily switching on EMV capability to accept chip cards, but often overlooked is how more small merchants are simply adding credit and debit card payments, whether chip-based or not. As a result, card payment volume at small merchants has risen almost 7% over the two years from July 2015 to June 2017, according to data from San Francisco-based Oto Analytics Inc., which does business as Womply.

It turns out small merchants in some states and cities are doing better than others, in many cases much better. The data also reveal which merchandise categories posted the highest increases in card-based spending at these merchants.

Hawaii came in with the highest increase in card-based volume for small merchants, at 14.19%. Georgia was a somewhat distant second (10.12%), followed by Colorado (9.96%). Small merchants in nearly all states posted at least some increase, with Alaska (-0.94%) and Wyoming (-1.12) being the only two states showing a drop.

Businesses in the auto, food, retail, and service categories racked up the most robust results over the past two years, the data indicate. Auto, for example, grew in all 50 states, including the two that were negative overall. Indeed, in Alaska, the category racked up a 10.86% increase. Small businesses in Womply’s data base have an average annual revenue of less than $500,000. Most of them employ 25 or fewer, with 52% boasting a staff of five or fewer.

Womply, which specializes in crunching transactional data, also looked at card-based volume changes in almost 200 cities. Here, the town featuring the biggest small-merchant volume growth was Glendale, Calif., at just shy of 22%. In fact, California boasts three cities in the top 10, with Santa Ana (18.57%) and Modesto (18.56%) ranking third and fourth. Charleston, S.C., at 20.49%, come in a close second to Glendale, boosted by a huge 81% jump in card-based auto volume.

The change was negative in just four cities, though two of them, Bossier City (-0.65%) and Lafayette (-2.04%), are in Louisiana. The other two are Corpus Christi, Texas, at -1.15%, and Anchorage, Alaska, at -1.35%. Wilmington, Del. (0.84%), Lubbock, Texas (0.72%), and Greenwood, S.C. (0.46%), showed growth, but barely so.

Rounding out the top 10 are Winter Haven, Fla. (18.54%), Boston (18.2%), Dothan, Ala. (17.79%), Vero Beach, Fla. 16.53%), Buffalo, N.Y. (16.44%), and Savannah, Ga. (15.25%). Among these top 10, the biggest boosts came from food sales (Winter Haven, at 39.85%), retail (Glendale, at 38.75%), and service (Buffalo, at 28.38%), in addition to that healthy rise in auto sales in Charleston.