Credit Card Processing - Best Way?

S.,

Seeing that you are a non-profit, you can contact Paypal's business section and get the reduced fees. We did that for our boy scout troop. I don't remember how much they reduced the fee too - but it made it soooo much easier for people who were buying mulch from the troop.

With the Paypal account, you can get a free reader as well.

Call them 888-338-7454 or check out their webiste:

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant

I wanted to respond to JB s comment about the availability of funds, it does not take a full day any longer. It did in the beginning now it just takes a few hours.

Yes, the square is awesome, you need to fill out special paperwork for a non profit with the square.

The iPad or cell hones will need to have cellular to work the best. We did an event at the Four Seasons, and their WiFi was patchy, so I let them use my iPad at the first event since I have wireless service.

You can use it with your regular bank account, it does not need a special account. It takes a few days to open the nonprofit account so do it as soon as possible.

The non profit our daughter worked for, she is the one that researched and compared. This was 2 years ago. The square was the easiest and lowest fee at the time, but I encourage you to speak with the financial institution your non profit works with to compare.

PayPal Here has a lower transaction fee than Square (2.7% vs. 2.75%). With PPH, in theory your money is available immediately, but it's in your PayPal account. To transfer to your bank account, you have to go into PP and initiate the transfer, which take a few days. Square makes payments directly to your bank account, but they don't release funds for a day.

In either case...both offer free devices that plug into your phone, tablet or computer. The PPH fee actually goes down even more (I think to 1.7%) if you have a PayPal debit card.

We just finished using a Blue Bamboo unit, FYI. We paid for the unit itself and then had monthly fees for the transactions. This was about 5 years ago before square readers were on the market and perfected. We were taking payments by phone on occasion (manually punching in the numbers on the unit which looks like a calculator) but also "live" payments from fairs and events we attended where we physically swiped the card.

There's a monthly fee from a credit card processor (such as AuthorizeNet but there are others) and then there's usually another institution that gets the money and puts it in your bank account (Chase Paymentech is one of many). You can tie these into your regular bank account but be sure you investigate all the fees. There's a monthly fee, first of all, but then there is a per-transaction fee. If they try to take money out but there isn't enough, of course there's a fee, but if they try to put money in and there's any kind of a glitch, they take a fee for that too!

You'd have to investigate whether the square reader goes on any phone or if you need a specific phone issued to the non-profit. Start with your own bank where your group has the account, and ask about everything!

You could also look into Pay Pal - but sometimes people get confused and think they need to have a Pay Pal account themselves. They don't. Pay Pal can act just as a credit card processor. We got rid of it because too many customers got confused by it and we weren't big enough (like, say, Amazon!) to be able to handle those who gave up out of confusion.

A lot of it has to do with how well your website is designed and how clear things are. If you don't have a good website, you'll need to look into design and hosting fees for that as well, unless it's already done.