Selling your goods and accepting credit cards

[pony]

First off, I am not affiliated with this company in any way. I recently found their credit/debit card reader online.
I run a couple of small businesses (software house, eBay store, wife's veterinary service - she works full time employed but does occasional work in our community as well). Previous payments were either checks, PayPal for my eBay business, and Kagi for the software company). Getting a full time credit card machine was always cost prohibitive due to the monthly fees - payable whether you used the service that month or not. Anyway, 'Square' now offer a FREE card reader that fits an iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Android phone. NO monthly fees. A reasonable 2.7% transaction fee. The money goes straight in to your bank account. Credit cards are authorized and validated in real time. You can even take phone orders (card holder not present) at 3.5%. You do not need a business bank account, and it can even be used by garage sale folks. It has some cool features like emailing the receipt to your customer, allowing you to photograph the product with your phone to add the image to the receipt.
Check them out http://www.squareup.com

This should open a few doors to those wanting to sell items and accept credit/debit cards, but not doing enough volume to justify a monthly service charge.

[eggauto]

Thanks so much for sharing this.

[ronsii]

It will be interesting to see how this works out for you we also run quite a few different businesses and so far every provider we have used has always been almost double than their advertised rate usually through 'other' fees, Just watch them like a hawk when you start using them and make sure they live up to their promises

I looked at their website and they seem legit...however with sales as slow as they are and things getting tight we quit taking cc's altogether... it's just one more fee we don't have to pay and most of out customers are going to buy from us regardless of wether or not we take cc's. We actually started taking them as a convenience to our customers(they usually wanted airline miles) So in a sense we were giving them a discount and paying to do it

Of course on a phone in $10.00 sale it will actually cost you 4.5%, but I guess if it means you get the sale versus not.... then I guess it is worth it....

[pony]

I looked at their website and they seem legit...however with sales as slow as they are and things getting tight we quit taking cc's altogether... it's just one more fee we don't have to pay

The founder of Square is also the founder of Twitter They are legit.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/03/disp ... litigious/

The way I look at it is it is insurance against bouncing or bad checks. There is an option to add a 'tip' amount as a fixed fee or as a percentage - so you could tell your customers you accept credit cards but charge the processing fee. It all depends on your business model and whether you think your customers would accept this. Considering the extra handling a check requires (taking it to the bank, filling deposit slips, handling any bad checks (and the charges they may create) I'll gladly eat 2.75%.

Taking your $10 item as an example, if I sold this on eBay or a web store and accepted payment by PayPal I would eat $0.59 in PayPal fees, compared to $0.50 in Square one fees. Using eBay, would also cost me $0.50 to list it, and $0.90 final value fee, totaling almost 20% in fees alone!
The point I am making is I always build enough profit in to my items to handle associated fees.It may not be right for every transaction, cash is king, but it will open doors to a wider audience.

Personally, when dealing with new vendors or sellers I always prefer to use a credit card rather than a check. Credit cards offer protection if things go wrong.

On items less than $3,000, the Square account is cheaper to use than the 'de-facto standard' in web commerce - PayPal. Not only is it cheaper, but you can take it anywhere, and if you get the sellers card in your hand (trade fares, farmers markets, stalls, etc) then the $10 item now only costs $0.43 to sell.

Another point, is given the nature of the option to have the receipt emailed to the customer, you are going to collect email addresses of all your customers when selling at a trade fare. A simple 'can I add you to the mailing list' would suffice.

[ronsii]

It does look like a pretty good deal from what else is out there

I only brought up the 10 dollar example because we used to sell a lot of small giftware items that were from 4 - 8 bucks plus shipping so the total would be 10 bucks or less... but that was back in the days when we still did a decent chunk of retail, these days we are pretty much a wholesale giftware manufacturer.

Did the ebay thing a few years back too....by the time we started figuring all our time into it we determined that the only ones making money were the middlemen

Hey Pony, I hope I didn't sound too skeptical or down on the idea of taking cc's We have just been screwed over by them so much am still a little mad at them I guess the main criteria is if it will help you increase sales and profit then go for it!!!

[pony]

Hey Pony, I hope I didn't sound too skeptical or down on the idea of taking cc's

You did, but I'm a pompous Brit