There is a particular kind of lost sale that a business almost never learns about: the customer who was ready to buy, reached the point of paying, and could not pay the way they wanted to - so they walked away, or bought elsewhere, without a word. It happens at a counter that takes only cash when the customer carries only a card, at a checkout that offers only one method the customer does not use, or with an invoice that demands a payment route the customer finds awkward. The decision to buy is a fragile moment, and discovering an obstacle right at the point of payment is one of the easiest ways to break it - all the more frustrating because the customer wanted to pay and the business wanted the sale, and neither happened over a mismatch of method.
The remedy is to meet customers where they are by offering more than one way to pay, rather than forcing everyone through the single route that happens to suit the business. Different customers, and different situations, favour different methods - cards, contactless and phone payments, bank transfers, and cash all still have their place, and which one a given customer will reach for is not something the business can dictate. Offering a reasonable range means that whichever way a ready customer prefers to pay, the option is there, and the sale completes instead of stalling. The goal is not to support every conceivable method, which brings its own cost and complexity, but to cover the ways the business's actual customers actually want to pay.
The benefit is largest at exactly the point where friction is most expensive: the end. Effort spent attracting a customer, answering their questions and bringing them to the decision to buy is all wasted if the final step trips them, and a payment obstacle trips them at the most costly possible moment - after all the work of winning them is done. Removing that obstacle is often one of the cheapest improvements available to a business, because the customer is already sold; nothing more needs to persuade them, only for the mechanics of paying not to get in the way. Making it easy and flexible to pay is, in that sense, less about convenience than about not undoing effort already spent.
There are costs to weigh - some payment methods carry fees, and each adds a little to reconcile - so the sensible approach is to offer the methods the business's customers genuinely use rather than reflexively adding every option. But the underlying discipline is to see payment as part of the customer experience, not a back-office afterthought: to look at how customers are actually turned away or inconvenienced at the point of paying, and to remove the mismatches. The sale lost because someone could not pay the way they wished is invisible and entirely preventable, and a business that makes paying easy captures customers that one clinging to a single method quietly, and unknowingly, lets slip away.