Cell phone card processing

a_kelley

a_kelley

mechanical fixer
Joined
Jan 26, 2010
Location
Rutherfordton
Looking for a decent cell based card processing widget & service. What's y'all's experiences with who and fees? It'd be nice to be able to accept credit debit cards but I don't know what's out there and is reasonable regarding fees and the like.
 
Square is easy and cheap enough.

My wife has used it for years and it works.
In our space specifically I am pretty @MarsFab used Square as well for a while, not sure if he still does or not but he may have some insight.

(Most of my wive's transactions are sub $20...whee I know Chris would have bigger numbers not sure if that have any bearing on user experience.)
 
The thing to look out for is RESERVES. As a new customer, of you land a bigger sale than normal they WILL hold all of that money for a period of time, usually up to 90 days. If your customer requires a return, you have to pay back with money out of your own pocket and still wait for the release. Generally, these off shoots really like to shuffle money and they WILL hold a certain % of all funds processed in a reserve account - money that ages in that account is auto dispersed to you upon a set age date. Ten dollars reserved one day means ten dollars will be released on the age date (e.g. 1 month).

Alot of these little phone reader processing companies are just companies using bigger name merchants, and to protect themselves and make money, they shuffle money at your expense.

Having tried quite a few. We have successfully settled on Intuit and running through QB. Have experienced zero BS to date. And it seamlessly syncs and works with our QB. Win win.

A piece of advice learned the hard way: dont chase the lowest % rate. The lower = they are making money by other means (e.g. money shuffling at your expense).

We tried Square. Worked for the small stuff, like the woman selling her bath salts. But when we tried to use it in business.... We spent a year waiting on thousands of dollars to arrive.
 
I use square. I don’t love it but it gets the job done and is worry free. There is a bunch of fine print you’ll want to read though. Like the first 800.00+ transaction does get held for 30 days or something. Plus don’t be an idiot like me and always manually enter the card info. Use the swiper that comes with it. The fee is larger to enter manually something like 2.75% vs 3.1% plus .15 for every transaction or some jibberish. The card reader wouldn’t ever work with my otter box or lifeproof cases so I never used it. Until recently I didn’t know there was a difference in fee between the two. I have taken many 10k plus payments with it and the funds are always deposited in my account within 3 business days. It’s not for every one but works good for me

One of the things I like about it is you can use it for invoicing on all transactions even cash or checks. Simply run it through just like a card but enter it as cash instead of a card number. This means you can instantly email invoices to customers. The user interface is pretty easy to use too. It’ll give you stats on your incoming money and will give you numbers for tax time.
They have many other services like payroll and gift cards too. I toyed with the idea of using their payroll to pay employees but everyone pushed me to use this piece of shit useless ass pile of crap called quickbooks. I absolutely fucking hate the damn program and now not only do I pay a premium monthly for them to simply print out 1 paycheck a week I also just got hit with a bullshit bill for almost 500 bucks for my yearly subscription to the bull shit. It’s a fucking nightmare to use and has way to many features that someone like me will never need or want. They complicate everything and it takes a call to Habeeb the quickbooks resident Indian programmer every week just to figure out how to print a fucking check.


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MarsFab said:
I use square. I don’t love it but it gets the job done and is worry free. There is a bunch of fine print you’ll want to read though. Like the first 800.00+ transaction does get held for 30 days or something. Plus don’t be an idiot like me and always manually enter the card info. Use the swiper that comes with it. The fee is larger to enter manually something like 2.75% vs 3.1% plus .15 for every transaction or some jibberish. The card reader wouldn’t ever work with my otter box or lifeproof cases so I never used it. Until recently I didn’t know there was a difference in fee between the two. I have taken many 10k plus payments with it and the funds are always deposited in my account within 3 business days. It’s not for every one but works good for me

One of the things I like about it is you can use it for invoicing on all transactions even cash or checks. Simply run it through just like a card but enter it as cash instead of a card number. This means you can instantly email invoices to customers. The user interface is pretty easy to use too. It’ll give you stats on your incoming money and will give you numbers for tax time.
They have many other services like payroll and gift cards too. I toyed with the idea of using their payroll to pay employees but everyone pushed me to use this piece of shit useless ass pile of crap called quickbooks. I absolutely fucking hate the damn program and now not only do I pay a premium monthly for them to simply print out 1 paycheck a week I also just got hit with a bullshit bill for almost 500 bucks for my yearly subscription to the bull shit. It’s a fucking nightmare to use and has way to many features that someone like me will never need or want. They complicate everything and it takes a call to Habeeb the quickbooks resident Indian programmer every week just to figure out how to print a fucking check.


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Click to expand...

It’s always wild how experiences differ. I see restaurants using square all the time. We tried it and it was a nightmare for a whole year. At one point we had a 5 figure charge held for 90 days.

Eventually we were told to stop calling and go somewhere else- the Indian said we were too risky of a business (agriculture) so longer hold times. I guess with square you have to fit within a certain type of square box to play? Lol

We’ve been blessed with QB. Never have had to get Indian tech support. We do all our accounting in house, so the fees are just a cost in the long run for us.

All of our orders are over the phone and we are unfortunately stuck at those higher rates.

#bankssuck
 
ckruzer said:
It’s always wild how experiences differ. I see restaurants using square all the time. We tried it and it was a nightmare for a whole year. At one point we had a 5 figure charge held for 90 days.

Eventually we were told to stop calling and go somewhere else- the Indian said we were too risky of a business (agriculture) so longer hold times. I guess with square you have to fit within a certain type of square box to play? Lol

We’ve been blessed with QB. Never have had to get Indian tech support. We do all our accounting in house, so the fees are just a cost in the long run for us.

All of our orders are over the phone and we are unfortunately stuck at those higher rates.

#bankssuck
Click to expand...

That’s interesting. I’ve never had a single transaction held. I wonder what the circumstances were? Or at least what they saw differently to hold the funds.


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MarsFab said:
That’s interesting. I’ve never had a single transaction held. I wonder what the circumstances were? Or at least what they saw differently to hold the funds.


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Click to expand...

With that one. Every single charge above 1k was held. With another we jumped from the one year average in transaction size by about 2.5. Went down hill from there. We tried all the phone reader brands. Same with all.

Thinking back on it. It may not have been our business type but rather we had to manually key every trans.

I reckon intuit being older just has more familiarity with businesses taking phone orders?

Dunno! My experience through it all and hours and hours of research into reviews of each and what others did to expedite the release of their monies, I learned one thing. No matter what who went with what, it’s always a roll of the dice. Every company had just as many good reviews as it did bad reviews haha.

So if I had to look again I wouldnt worry about rates or the popularity of it. I wanna know your reserve policy and your age limitations of it and I want to know your tiered hold times proportional to customer history. And i want to know the average transaction amounts that can be set to the account to avoid “unusual” trans flags. Always a risky question to ask, but i would research their red flags.

Lol I’m just glad we fell out of the crack and running strong 4 years now
 
Tonya has a square thru pay pal she uses at Antique sales.I think its like 3% or something.As long as you have cell sevice it works good.She used it all last summer w/o issue.
 
QB here. Swipes are usually over 1000, and gets in the bank account in 3 days.

QB is good for us now. Had to hire a lady to teach us to adjust things for us. She still comes in every quarter to fix things.
 
Sounds like I'll need to check out the square. I wonder if a local place retails the units... thanks.. I'll keep checking back if anyone comes up with a better solution, and to payp my experience..

Doesn't or didn't PayPal accept cards at some point? Or does that require a business PayPal?
 
a_kelley said:
Sounds like I'll need to check out the square. I wonder if a local place retails the units... thanks.. I'll keep checking back if anyone comes up with a better solution, and to payp my experience..

Doesn't or didn't PayPal accept cards at some point? Or does that require a business PayPal?
Click to expand...
Tonya got her reader free from pay pal.
 
a_kelley said:
I'll check that out as well, although PayPal and I had a failing out a decade ago.
Click to expand...
Things have and are changing w PP.Ebay is starting to phase out the use of PP.They have another way to pay coming.On a whole Ebay and PP are like oweing the mob,seems like you never get them paid off.They're card readers work good as long as you have cell service.
 
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