Three reasons your wrestling club should offer payment plans

As the next wrestling season approaches, it's a good time to consider offering payment plans—sometimes called installment plans—in addition to your traditional upfront pricing. As an example, if you charge $400 for your folkstyle season that lasts four months, a payment plan could break the payments up into monthly bills of $100 each. 

If you're thinking that sounds like a lot of work to collect money from people four times as often, you aren't wrong—collecting cash and checks twelve times a season is a quick way to go insane. However, most modern team registration software will handle automatically charging credit/debit cards for you. If installment plans are something you want to offer for your team, take a peek at WrestlingIQ for an easy way to automatically collect installment plan charges for your next season.

Parents want their kids involved in sports, but many don't have the ability to pay a large lump sum

According to the federal reserve, 36% of Americans would be unable to come up with cash to cover a $400 unexpected expense. That's a lot of people who couldn't pay for your team's season, even if they wanted to. 

By splitting up your payments throughout the season, you give families a way to plan their expenses without having to put your registration fee on a costly credit card. 

Lower upfront costs encourages new families to join

Growing your wrestling club effectively is all about competing in your local area against other sports and activities.

If parents of young children are choosing between a soccer team and wrestling team, but the wrestling team lets them pay monthly instead of paying a big upfront bill, it's an easy call to know which team is a more risky financial decision. If their kid doesn't like wrestling, they can stop mid-season without being out hundreds of dollars (or pestering you for a refund). 

We know wrestling is a great sport for building young people up, why wouldn't we do everything we can to get more wrestlers in the door to give it a try?

Payment plans are becoming an expected option for major purchases

With the rise of payment plans from companies like Affirm and Klarna making their way into major retailers, most people understand the concept of payment plans–and many expect them. 

What some people might not know is that most payment plan offerings are actually a loan, complete with a hard pull against your credit score, which can wreak unexpected havoc on families financial health. They do this because they pay out the merchant in one lump sum, then collect (and in some cases take to collections) their payments downstream. 

For wrestling teams, this heavy handed approach is too much. Instead of integrating with Affirm/Klarna, team registration software like WrestlingIQ save the credit card details and then charge them on the date of the next payment. There are tradeoffs to each implementation, but to your customers the mechanics of being billed in installments is still the same.