What payment methods do people frequently use that can be signed up for *without* an app?
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@geonz Good point, maybe I'll bike over there tomorrow and see if they have anything that's not obvious on the website. Thanks!
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@sam (( I wouldn't get too hopeful. There's the whole "but everybdoy has...!!!" -- just ask the professor around the corner who still has a land line and no cell phone; they had to get him a device for Stuff From College.)
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@geonz oh you don't have to tell me, I get "but everybody has X" said to me at least once a week. I'm only finally giving in and willing to sign up for a payment thing because I'm desperate to not loose my house and have a few potential clients for bicycle maintenance that don't want to deal in cash, I should probably get over myself and just make things easy on them
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@rochelle I was forgetting about paypal; thanks! I'm going to have to *really* push myself to create an account with them, I hate them beyond almost any company (after some bad experiences years ago with them pulling really shady stunts on both personal stuff and some non-profits I volunteered for), but if people want to pay me for bicycle maintenance I should probably get over myself make that easy on them!
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@sam it's *possible* that the bank can tell you a less invasive way to do it... there's a subreddit on privacy, too, that chats about things like that.
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@geonz the problem with less invasive ways is that I suspect potential customers won't want to use them, but we'll see!
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@sam @angiebaby I regretfully signed up for Venmo because of my soon-to-be-former landlord. I thought it required a fucking app, but fortunately it does not. However, it is owned by PayPal, and impressively, is even less secure than PayPal. Venmo doesn't have an option for FIDO nor even TOTP authentication; if someone gets your password, phone number, and can intercept SMS, they could take as much money from you as they want.
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@be @angiebaby *facepalm* how is that not criminal negligence? Good to know, thanks. They won't let me sign up at all because they don't think my number can receive texts, but instead of asking their support maybe I'll just do paypal if it's the same thing anyways.
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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)
Compare SumUp Card Readers | Accept card payments with ease
SumUp Card Readers help small businesses get paid easily and affordably. Compare card reader options.
SumUp - A Better Way to Get Paid (www.sumup.com)
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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.