Time to Square off with merchant services accounts.

[Adam Chant]

I have been talking about QR Codes for months now and this week I want to direct attention to a different business tool. Just about every retail business big or small is required to accept credit cards, however for the small time business or hobby-business owner it can be difficult. Signing up with merchant services requires a bit of paper work some expensive hardware and a monthly and often annual contract. Who wants to go through all of that work for a small time business? Not many and so for the most part trade show and festival merchants are left accepting only cash. With the ever increasing popularity of the internet and smart mobile devices options are starting to pop up that allow these merchants to accept plastic payments.

 

Now with an iPhone or iPad you can use a number of card scanners to accept credit cards. In some cases its so easy you can be up and running in a matter of days. A product I signed up for is Square and they have a small square device that connects to the mic port of an iPad or iPhone to accept credit cards. Signing up takes only a few minutes and they send out the reader (currently for free) within a few days. I had my reader in about 5 days and processed my first transaction within 30 seconds of installing it in the iPad.

They charge 2.75% for every transaction scanned and deposit up to $1000 a month directly into your linked checking account. If you do more than $1000 in transactions they hold it for 30 days before depositing it, but as I said this is for hobby merchants. One feature that I really like is that the software app (also free) uses the iPad to also take the signature from the customer by finger swipe.

You can't run a retail clothing business on this, but having it available for a weekend fair or even to split the bill at lunch makes it worth it's weight in gold.

 

Intuit and other conventional merchants are also getting into the mobile payment game with similar products. Since we have decided to use the iPad for our Point of Sale system for our store we have a product from intuit coming in the next few days. It offers the same type of fees and processing up to $1000, but for larger volume merchants they also offer conventional merchant account services. One advantage to the intuit product is that it integrates with Quick Books and a lot of smaller companies use quick books.

Once we get our scanner from Intuit I will post again.. If you are a small business or don't do much in the way of sales then this is a good way to reach more customers that you would otherwise have missed the opportunity with.

 

 

[Graphic Experience 945.1718]

Great info, Adam. As usual...