Thursday, November 18, 2010

L 7 Square

Last year I was approached with a proposition to buy a credit card machine so I may charge folks for items me or my band may be selling. It was $300 for the machine(not for keepsies), then $30 monthly for service fees, and then they also took a little cut from each sale. After pondering for a bit and considering, "Well if I sell a shit ton of things then it'll even itself out" I decided to pass. Why can't I just charge people from their cards without all the extra charges? Enter Square.
This is not a commercial for Square, more of a "well looky here" kind of thing.
Square is like if PayPal reached out of your computer and hopped in your pocket. There is a PayPal app for iPhone, but you're still stuck just sending email requests for money like a shy gopher. With Square, it allows you to turn your phone into a credit card scanner and get right in the action..... like a more outgoing gopher, with more friends.

Without doing any research, what I hear about Square is that it's the folks from Twitter who made it and it is boss. You sign up, which involves giving your social (yikes, we'll see if I've been robbed soon) and then right away they ship you a little card reader that you can stick in your iPhones headphone jack. That's right, headphone jack. I don't know how it works but it does. I got to see one in action today. The best part is that the reader is free and there are no processing fees. Just a 2.75% tax on income and that's it. It works just like PayPal and might be giving it a run for its money.....


No comments:

Post a Comment