You want to get an understanding of how people are paying for things. Here’s a set of stats to give you the lay of the land. All these numbers are approximate so take them with a grain of salt.
Also remember, statistics can be easily skewed in many ways. To get a real picture of what is happening, you’ll need to take several about a subject matter and come up with your own conclusion on how to use them for your business.
- The number of payment cards (debit and credit) globally is 15 billion
- There are 885 million Visa credit cards in the world
- There are 725 million MasterCard credit cards in the world
- The average North American adult has 2.5 credit cards
- The average credit card processing fee is 2%
- USA merchants lose $190 billion a year to credit card fraud
- 1 out of 15 consumers became victims of identity fraud
- One new debit card is issued in the US every five seconds
- Cash is used for about 30% of transactions in North America
- Cash represents about 10% of the value of transactions
- 11% of retail sales are eCommerce
- There are around 32 million businesses in USA
- There are about 2 million businesses in Canada
- About 30% of all businesses are shell businesses (no operations)
- About 33% of businesses accept credit cards
- Less than 10% of payments use checks now
- Average chargeback rates are below 1%
