Swipe Credit Cards with Your Smartphone

Accept­ing cred­it cards using your iPhone, Black­ber­ry or Android phones have been avail­able for a num­ber of years using spe­cif­ic apps. How­ev­er, not to 2010 did a nifty pro­gram and prod­uct become avail­able to small busi­ness­es: Square. Square is a tiny device that plugs into your phone’s aux­il­iary port and enables a user to swipe a con­sumer’s cred­it card, have them sign their sig­na­ture and even sends an emailed receipt. The neat thing about Square is there are no month­ly fees. So if you are not doing a lot of cred­it card swipes, Square is def­i­nite­ly worth con­sid­er­ing. The soft­ware and Square device are com­plete­ly free. You only pay a $.15 trans­ac­tion fee plus around 2.7% to your friends at VISA, Mas­ter­Card, and so on. One draw back is the trans­ac­tion per­cent­age. I use Autho​rize​.net for my cred­it card trans­ac­tions and my local bank: PNC. I pay around 2.3% for my fees and have a month­ly fee of around $40. I’ve shopped around a bit but am com­fort­able at this rate for now. By using Square, I’d pay a lit­tle more, but again…you don’t want to have to wait for your mon­ey too long. If you have some­thing that takes cred­it cards, chances are you’ll get paid on the spot. So, if you are a small busi­ness and need to get paid, use the Square. This can be a great tool for esti­ma­tors who need to get a deposit right away to secure a con­tract. Learn more about Square (start­ed by the guy who cre­at­ed Twitter)