Card payments

[Graham Ashford]

Hello folks

I wonder whether or not you might be able to help.

I've been thinking about ways to take card payments at markets, I tend to only do a couple a year s it's not a great problem, just a service I would like to be able to reliably offer.

Can anyone suggest ways of being able to take card payments at markets that it reliable enough but doesn't need any long term monthly contracts that won't get used for most of the year?

Thanks

Kind regards

Graham

[9thEarlDouglas]

PayPal are offering some sort of terminal that hooks into your phone (Bluetooth /WiFi) type thing, you buy the card reader then process as a normal card transaction, obviously there are the dreaded fees to take into account but by all accounts sounds like what you are after.
Al.

[sally]

If you and your client have phones that connect to the internet, you can go direct to paypal to make payments, plus some banks also do automatic transfers by phone (Barclays is called Pingit I think) We've successfully taken paypal payments by phone at shows far less painfully than the year when we tried a small card reader, which never seemed to work properly

[Redders]

Paypal Card Reader works with Paypal here Payment app - Easy to use. Reader costs about £60 (I might even have a spare?)

As Sally says, direct from Paypal to paypal is hassel free if both have paypal accounts. Only one device needed

Worldpay do Virtual Terminal so no need for a costly Terminal. That's if you have a Worldpay account of course

There'll be other options, these are from my own personal experience.

You can always bung it thru my reader if you're stuck as we're next to each other sometimes

[Lionheart Replicas]

Just caught this question Graham as I don't come here often.... I have a Worldpay Zinc card reader which links to my phone (or tablet) via bluetooth. Providing you have a decent phone signal or wifi it works very well. The account also gives you you a virtual terminal for phone orders and the option to take payments via a link (a bit like a Paypal invoice). The account is free & the reader is currently less than £40. There are other similar ones such as Paypal's & the basic one from izettle is free, although they do a bluetooth one for £60 or so. Before I had my reader I used a virtual terminal but found it one hell of a faff & customers did get impatient. Of course all systems are dependent on a mobile reception & in the sort of places where we trade that can be a big problem.

[jjordan_12]

In the United States I use Square. It has a feature that allows you to process payments even if you can't connect to phone service. That's very important to me as most of the events I attend don't have cell-phone access. I also like the ability to utilize the Square Marketplace to put my inventory in and then link to it via the phone app so that inventory is updated as I sell items. If you want to use all the features there's a bit of a learning curve and a lot of set up work to be done. If you just want to process simple card payments you can do that as well.