Small business - credit card machine
Discussion
dartissimus said:
For a quick easy startup, the Paypal card reader is cheap (purchase outright at £59) and easy to work; it uses your mobile phone as a modem. no dedicated phoneline or broadband needed, money into you Paypal account quicker than the regular systems
I have one as a backup and for anything external; the percentage charge is about 2.5%.
As said elsewhere setting up with a merchant service provider, is horrible, multi year contracts, monthly bills for terminal rental, PCI DSS compliance, which is demanded, but useless, and as for receiving several bills for the separate sections.
You want more nightmare stuff ? We used to use Global Payments (HSBC).
Their system went down, helplines blocked, no information, no emails, no apologies, no money coming in.
Oh, and apparently their own system failed their own security requirements.
Having to deal with Worldpay (try doing a refund!!) this make senseI have one as a backup and for anything external; the percentage charge is about 2.5%.
As said elsewhere setting up with a merchant service provider, is horrible, multi year contracts, monthly bills for terminal rental, PCI DSS compliance, which is demanded, but useless, and as for receiving several bills for the separate sections.
You want more nightmare stuff ? We used to use Global Payments (HSBC).
Their system went down, helplines blocked, no information, no emails, no apologies, no money coming in.
Oh, and apparently their own system failed their own security requirements.
dartissimus said:
You want more nightmare stuff ? We used to use Global Payments (HSBC).
Their system went down, helplines blocked, no information, no emails, no apologies, no money coming in.
Oh, and apparently their own system failed their own security requirements.
I can second this experience for Global Payments, a farce from start to finish with their own staff oblivious to their own security procedures and technical staff unaware of the actual process of a transaction from start to finish.... a week before Christmas they lost £6k.... I say lost, we all knew where it was but as their own security team deleted the transaction their end (He admitted as soon as it happened) they didn't know how to get it back to us (without dropping one of their own in it I suspect), in the end it took 10 days.Their system went down, helplines blocked, no information, no emails, no apologies, no money coming in.
Oh, and apparently their own system failed their own security requirements.
At one point they even wanted us to call the customer and ask to take the money again!
https://squareup.com/gb - new kids on the block - cheaper than izettle for what she needs, easy and money banked quickly.
We use iZettle and have forked out for a StarPop cash-drawer and receipt printer. Our stock runs to over 5000 products so we have upgraded the iPad to a newer model as the old 1st get iPad we were using was dog slow.
No complaints at all. Fees are better than PayPal Here, setup and interface is effortless, and the ability to import and export the product catalogue makes that side easier too.
I use the iZettle database with a basic Brother label printer to print out bar-code labels for the stock items that need it, so it's all pretty easy
No complaints at all. Fees are better than PayPal Here, setup and interface is effortless, and the ability to import and export the product catalogue makes that side easier too.
I use the iZettle database with a basic Brother label printer to print out bar-code labels for the stock items that need it, so it's all pretty easy
All this talk has got me looking at it again, however I have two big sticking points, firstly cost, the percentage charge.
At a rough calculation we pay about 1.2% at present so most of them are much dearer.
Secondly we sell fabric, cut from the roll so whilst we have some stock controll we don't sell exact units of red, white or blue in small medium or large, so the pos stock systems are of no use to us.
However a more flexible till, i.e. a database on a tablet with a printer might be what we need.
Many of these systems don't integrate with Shopify which we use for our online sales, and the Amazon arguement means I'd never risk putting myself into their hands
At a rough calculation we pay about 1.2% at present so most of them are much dearer.
Secondly we sell fabric, cut from the roll so whilst we have some stock controll we don't sell exact units of red, white or blue in small medium or large, so the pos stock systems are of no use to us.
However a more flexible till, i.e. a database on a tablet with a printer might be what we need.
Many of these systems don't integrate with Shopify which we use for our online sales, and the Amazon arguement means I'd never risk putting myself into their hands
dartissimus said:
Secondly we sell fabric, cut from the roll so whilst we have some stock controll we don't sell exact units of red, white or blue in small medium or large, so the pos stock systems are of no use to us.
This is exactly what we do ( https://habbydays.co.uk ) and iZettle supports a 'custom unit' pricing on products. That means you can price per metre and charge at the requisite fractions. feef said:
dartissimus said:
Secondly we sell fabric, cut from the roll so whilst we have some stock controll we don't sell exact units of red, white or blue in small medium or large, so the pos stock systems are of no use to us.
This is exactly what we do ( https://habbydays.co.uk ) and iZettle supports a 'custom unit' pricing on products. That means you can price per metre and charge at the requisite fractions. My brother, who has geekish tendencies, was involved a long time ago in setting up Datacash, and who knows a bit, told me the following:
"SumUp: charges 1.95%. They use 2fa to authenticate initial account setup, and end-to-end encryption for the credit card authentication stage. However, the web dashboard (https://sumup.me ) uses only a standard username and password to log in. The dashboard can be used to change the password, shop for products (card readers), and refund transactions. An attacker with your username and password could in principle buy lots of stuff, wait for it to be shipped, then refund or chargeback the payments. Because payments don't go into an account with SumUp (as with PayPal) but straight to your bank account, there's no other obvious way for an attacker to pull money out. But you should be sure to use a very strong password with this system (16-24 characters, uppercase, lowercase, digits, symbols — a mixture) because it's a financial service, hence high-profile hacking target.
iZettle: charges 2.75%. (Drops progressively to 1% if you turn over a high volume of transactions — £40,000/month for the 1% tariff.) Works like Paypal insofar as you create an account with iZettle that retains money received from the customer's credit card provider until it's paid into your bank account or refunded. The iZettle account is accessed via the web using a username and password (*no* two-factor authentication) and the user can authorize payments to their linked bank account, or change bank account details. An attacker with your account name and password could swap their own details in for the business bank account, drain your iZettle account, and set things back without leaving an obvious trace (except the lack of money in your account). And their web dashboard security is worse than PayPal's.
So, to summarize:
SumUp is a no-frills straight-up credit card service. No extras, but by the same token, fewer points at which it can be attacked. In contrast, iZettle tries to be PayPal, but is less secure in ways that make my skin crawl."
One of the additional differences between PayPal and iZettle is that iZettle pays into your bank account automatically (ours is set to daily) albeit normally a day or two after the transactions have completed. We leave £50 in the iZettle account to allow for any required refunds. PayPal requires you to do a manual transfer.
Fair comments on the TFA tho.
One of the other things that I like about iZettle is the API. While it's designed for mobile app developers, I'm working with it to integrate the inventory monitoring with our online shop to keep things in sync.
With regards to datacash, I'm not sure they offer a chip and pin terminal like iZettle. Datacash and the like work for an online transaction system but not in-store (unless they have launched a chip and pin device).
To qualify my own experience, I've spent much of my career as a dba working and off with Netbanx (now part of Paysafe) on their databases for the card transaction system, so I'm reasonably familiar with the security requirements of these systems.
Fair comments on the TFA tho.
One of the other things that I like about iZettle is the API. While it's designed for mobile app developers, I'm working with it to integrate the inventory monitoring with our online shop to keep things in sync.
With regards to datacash, I'm not sure they offer a chip and pin terminal like iZettle. Datacash and the like work for an online transaction system but not in-store (unless they have launched a chip and pin device).
To qualify my own experience, I've spent much of my career as a dba working and off with Netbanx (now part of Paysafe) on their databases for the card transaction system, so I'm reasonably familiar with the security requirements of these systems.
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