Card Payment Machines

[New Boy]

Quick question please,

 

Do these machines speed up payment on completion, just because the customer can pay,do they?? Whats your experience and what percentage of your customers pay you on completion if you have a mobile payment machine?

 

Thanks

 

New Boy

[Rigger Mortis]

In my experience in another industry. Yes, well worth it. Removes the " I will have to send you a cheque as my husband has the cheque book". Then you have to go to the bank to deposit the bloody cheque and wait for it to clear.

[AcaciaRental]

As Rigger Mortis has said, it can prevent long payment time, and also gives the customer more flexibility if they want to pay by card! It's all about making it easy for the customer

 

Worth hunting around as the charges for accepting cards can vary quite a lot (American Express is through the roof for all of them). Some companies, such as Sage, offer a service where you can accept a variety of cards and its pretty cheap. I think the Sage one is called SagePay.

[HertsWood]

Try Payleven. Chip & pin that connects via Bluetooth to an iPad or iPhone. Got mine, works well & no minimum contract terms. Great customer service as well.

 

 

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[Rigger Mortis]

PS, avoid anything to do with Merchant Rentals. Cannot be arsed to go into details but always read the small print especially this bit "Bend over and take it like a man".

[richy_B]

I hate cheques and do not take them. Having to take them to the bank during the working day, time to clear, possibility of bouncing, easy to cancel after you've left, etc, etc. Not worth the hassle.

 

I take card payments via Barclaycard merchant services - It is pretty good. £10 a month minimum charge, 1.75% transaction fee, 12 month contract I believe. You can operate it via any web browser so can take a card payment on a 3/4G device pretty easily. They also do a 3G handset you can 'physically' take payment on. £20 a month minimum, 1.75% still. Instant payment and provided you input an email address the customer gets a receipt straight away.

[scraggs]

Best thing we ever done, it's been discussed on here lots before, at the moment at least 75% of our turnover is done via cards, I no longer accept cheques unless it's from account customers.

But as said above, if you go with a merchant service check the small print and then check it again, some of them are plain and simple liars, and the contract doesn't even remotely resemble what you are told.

I have just looked at renewing our merchant services and out of the lot paymentsense were by far the biggest liars, sage were good but were very vague on how much PCI compliance was going to cost, barclays were good but a bit too pricey and there GPRS machine only used 2 networks for the roaming sim, both of which are crap around here, I decided to stick with the devil I know cardsave but they are now worldpay.

Depending on how much you take on the machine per month is the best way to decide if you use a proper machine and merchant account or a mickey mouse one like the izettle or the others that use your mobile phone, merchant account percentages are considerably less.

Do your homework properly is essential, some of the merchant account small print can tie you in for years and cost you a fortune in hidden get out fees.

Had sage been more clued up on PCI compliance fee's I would have gone with them, their contract was clear and was what I was told on the phone, there didn't appear to be any hidden nasties.

Edited June 17, 2014 by scraggs

[dan494]

After a hard day's graft just been handed a cheque post dated to Friday and told not to cash it until then (not impressed at all) so am very seriously going to look at a card payment options and stop all cheques

 

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[Stephen Blair]

You need to discuss payment terms at the pricing stage.

Some folk run on a very strict budget, if you never said, they don't know, people can't be expected to read minds.

All they may of said was, make it next week when we get paid .

 

 

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[New Boy]

Thanks all and scraggs, cardsave sound interesting, what does the phase merchant services actually mean though please?

 

New Boy