What payment methods do people frequently use that can be signed up for *without* an app?
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@sam How seriously do you want to get into the run your own bicycle shop business?
Have you looked into sumup? They sell you a 'proper' POS terminal for $100 and then you can just accept credit cards (and not require your customer to have the same app)I don't actually know how the experience is from the business side but from a consumer side I notice that it has become really popular in Europe (the terminals are branded so it's easy to recognize)
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@daniel that's probably a good idea too, thanks. There sure are a lot of POS companies these days. Trying to compare this, Square, Clover, and whatever my credit union offers is proving challenging…
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Basically all bike shops in the U.S. use Lightspeed, but damn is it *expensive* compared to the competition. I have used it too, and as far as I can tell it's no better than anything else for bikes, it just says "Bike shop version" or whatever at the top. Surely I'm missing something and there's a reason everyone is using this even though it takes such a large chunk of your already limited revenue?
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Related to payment methods: does anyone have experience with Odoo? It looks nice overall but I'd be curious to hear what works well and what doesn't from someone who's used it.
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@sam stripe? I collect payments through stripe? or do you mean like peer to peer?
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@sam if you don't want to deal with international tax there's also paddle
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@eb oh yah, I forgot about Stripe. I vaguely remember them being *way* more expensive than the competitors, but I'll have to take a look again. Thanks! I've actually tried Paddle before but stopped using it after their API was really horribly documented (there's a partial SDK I wrote in Go here: https://code.soquee.net/paddle/), but this won't need anything international, just taking card swipes locally.
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@eb they also flat out refuse to tell you how much their card readers are, which feels sketchy.
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@sam stripe is fair imo. I think we're paying 2.5%.
If you're doing local you were probably looking at square instead of stripe (though stripe also has it). This class of software is called POS. Both stripe and square are around 2.6% + 10c
I'm familiar with this (I help run a local small business) and you're not going below 2.5% without negotiations (and at that point .2 for square is worth it).
That's why you see small businesses asking people to pay cash, but not large ones.
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@eb I was thinking of their manual entry which is $0.30 per transaction on top of the percentage. I did just find updated info with the devices and the cost (they try to hide it behind login, but it's there if you dig). For that it's 2.7% + 0.05¢, which is hard to compare but roughly the same as the others (square is 2.6%+$0.10 for example). Still, how any of them think it's okay to take 2.6% of your entire business (more or less, I suspect most people around here pay card) is beyond me.
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@sam credit card companies double dip. They get extraordinary amounts of money from predatory loans, and then charge businesses money on top of that. Businesses that refused them died. Large businesses with nice deals grew. Until recently we were actually sering higher fees on our end for American Express (Visa and MC charge 1.5%, AM charged 3%!!). That’s why some businesses dont take AM.
Such is how capitalism works in this stupid country
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@sam PayPal, right? It has a web app, or at least you can use it on desktop in a browser
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@frrstbrwn I'm starting to think that's going to be the one. Damn I hate PayPal though.
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@sam Yeah it does kind of suck. Do you need it for a small business use? You might try checking G2 or Capterra if you haven’t already just to see if there are other options
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@frrstbrwn I haven't heard of either of those, thanks, I'll add them to my big list of comparisons!
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@sam Oh sorry, I meant those are websites where you can find solutions and read reviews, not solutions themselves
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@frrstbrwn oooh, gotcha, I'll go read through them later then. Thanks again!