It will be interesting to see what this thread develops.
I have a friend that uses intuit pay, takes a 2.75% transaction fee.(ouch) When pitted against pay pal and flea bay fees its on a par.
I wonder if Neil uses anything, after all he hits more shows per year than some of us will do in a lifetime..
I use a card machine facility using Streamline and Cardsave.
If you want to use a fully all singing all dancing credit card facility you have to have it linked to a business account. You process cards, the money appears in your account a few days later and they rob you blind for the privilidge. After you have been robbed because of the commission, they rob you further with the monthly rental arrangement for the wretched machine.
This type of machine operates in one of two ways. Either you stick the card in the machine and get the customer to stick their pin in the machine, or you can take mail order payments on it using a process called "customer not present" where you dial in the number you have been given over the phone and then put in the expiry date, three figure security code, letters from the billing address postcode, number the pope first thought of last Thursday and if you manage to get all that info in before the local phone mast crashes or they change the currency, then you get paid.
When you insert the card in the machine it is alledgedly more secure because the owner is deemed to be in possession of the card and if they haven't cancelled it, they are liable for the bill. You get charged one level of commission. If you use the Customer not present funcyion, you get charged more. You get charged different rates if the payments are debit cards than if they are credit cards, presumably because as a consumer, there is a better degree of protection against goods bought with a credit card, so they pass that cost on to a retailer, like me, thanks a bunch, robbed again.
The wretched machine, if you stick the card in it, defaults to operating on the GPRS system, and when the government let the current phone contracts they put the access priority for card machines at the bottom of the pile, below smart phones. So, you have a big event and everyone turns up with their smart phones talking incessantly and relatively unnecessarily to the masts, jamming the signal and the machines dont work. So you have to use either the manual swipe machines that went out with the ark and process the transaction at your risk later. I haver had one declined today that I could not process earlier. I will recoup the money, but only by doing something that is technically illegal, so,
Robbed again!
Thecommission charges on these machines are much lower than the one off payment options that are flooding the markets at the moment, There is the one that Paul mentions, Paypal have one, theres IZettle, one from WorldPay called Zinc and several others. They all have one thing in common,
robbed again!
Barclays are trying to introduce a pay by phone option which has about as much chance of success as profitting from a parking meter on the moon, and there are others.
The option that you have depends on the volume of transactions. There is no option for me, its the card machine like what you get in the shops but as a GPRS terminal, I can adjust it when I trade abroad as well.
A few points on helping you to chosse which option. My receipts show a marked and continuing decline in Credit cards. Debit card transactions this year are down significantly. There is a definite tendency to return to a cash soceity. I would normally have expected to take 65% of my transactions at any one show on the cash machine, over the last two weeks, card transactions have accounted for 20% by financial volume. Whether that is a blip or not I cannot be certain but I suspect not, time will tell.
Oh, by the way, the commission for card machines is a percentage for credit and a fixed fee for debit, so the average ticket price (sale value) can affect your choice as well.
All clear?
One thing is certain, the system fleeces independent traders. Paypal are financial parisites and the cash machine comapnies employ the rudest, most unhelpful people you can possibly imagine. I tell a lie actually, theyre worse!
Have fun!!
Cheers Paul .. :nonono:
not a happy bunny with it..