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Taking Credit Cards
Any easy way to accept a credit card, besides PayPal? I have a client that apparently must pay me with a credit card. Usually I’m paid with a check, but in the case of credit cards, I normally I just send a PayPal invoice and it’s done. In this case, PayPal does not “like” the two credit cards that we have tried to process. It’s not that the cards are denied, it’s a cryptic error message that calls to PayPal have not resolved. Any ideas?
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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9 Replies
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Square?
I haven’t used them (we don’t take CCs either), but I know lots of people do. This is certainly not a review, just a “Hey I know this is out there, too.”
You can also take credit cards with a QuickBooks account. We had one set up for a while but dropped it because 1) it had some significant setup/maintenance fees, and 2) we never ever take credit cards, so what’s the point? But they’re out there.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Jason Jenkins] “Any easy way to accept a credit card, besides PayPal? I have a client that apparently must pay me with a credit card.”
You can accept credit cards through PayPal. That’s how we do it at our shop. We used to have a merchant account but the fees were getting stupid. Credit Card payments through PayPal are easy because there are no yearly fees, just the fees on the actual transactions.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaCraft and Career Advice & Training from real Working Creative Professionals
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I have 2 clients that must pay anything under $1000 with a CC. (Yes, I try to bump up the budget first!) Large corporations and each of them “didn’t trust” paying with PayPal. Sheesh. So I have a Square https://squareup.com/ account that is used 3-4 times per year.
Clients give me their number over the phone so no swipe, which increased the rate to 3.5%. For these clients, they do plenty of other work with me so the fee is no big deal; but it is $35 on a $1000 sale. That’s a huge fee if you’re not expecting to be paid this way.
Plus some bookkeeping entries to balance the income and bank fee accounts.
Steve
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The local greeting car store I patronize uses Square. I know some folks have PayPal horror stories, but I’ve never had a problem in years of use.
I wonder when the first COW member sees a client payment via bitcoin.
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Seeing as we are partly a direct to customer outfit we have a merchant account with a traditional CC machine. Website transactions go through electronically. We also use a machine for transactions at trade shows, or a website backend control panel.
Mike Cohen -
I ended up signing up for a Square account (free and easy). I sent the client an invoice generated in Square. They were still having problems paying online, (IT problems or operator error?) so they forwarded the email invoice to me and I input the CC info they had already given me. The next day I had the money in my account! The 2.75% fee is better than PayPal’s 2.9% + .30.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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[Steve Kownacki] “Clients give me their number over the phone so no swipe, which increased the rate to 3.5%. For these clients, they do plenty of other work with me so the fee is no big deal; but it is $35 on a $1000 sale. That’s a huge fee if you’re not expecting to be paid this way.”
Steve: If you send them an email invoice from your Square account, then the fee goes down to 2.75%.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!Check out my Mormon.org profile.
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Thanks for the heads up Jason!
Steve
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We use Square for a specific client. However, our general contract states that we do not accept credit cards, due to the fee’s that are incurred. If a client insists (this is usually so that they can get rewards from their CC) then we tack on a % on top for processing. Unfortunately it’s not a “neat” way to do it, but due to having to use Square, wait for the money to process through that application, then finally get deposited in our account, and finally for me to have to go in and manually match the transaction (because the amount of $ deposited will never be the exact amount you wrote the invoice for), it’s a small price for that company to pay.
Remember, taking CC are for the client’s convenience. That convenience should cost them money, it shouldn’t cost you your money and time.
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