Cloud Based or Ipad based payment options.

Morning Optiboard,

I am an employee at a private ECP in NY and I was hired as both an optician and marketing consultant to help grow the expanding business. My goal is to make operations easier for the practice.

We are currently using an older credit card machine and I recommended that the practice switch over to Ipad based or cloud based payment systems. These systems seem to offer lower rates and are more reliable than older systems.

Does anybody on the forum use these systems? Pros and cons? Which one you like best?

Thanks in advance.

-BP3

Be sure to dig in deep to find out. I looked at doing Square, thinking it was going to be really cheap, but it was within a few dollars per month.

Maybe a newer CC machine? If you talk to a couple different merchant services, they are usually competitive. However, that only lasts for about a year, and then it sneaks back up.

It is ALWAYS much cheaper to run debit for the transactions, so push that as much as possible....

The simplest online payment and mobile payment processors are not cheap. You pay for the convenience. Paypal and Squares fees are 2.9% and 2.75%, plus I believe about $0.30 transaction fee. Our standard processor charges just 1.9$+$0.30, 30% less. For day to day the traditional methods are still most competitive for anything but the tiniest or mobile/internet businesses. We do use PayPal occasionally for online billing and invoicing to make it as easy as possible for people to pay us. They are more likely to pay when it's just a click than when they have to call or receive a call from our office.

It depends on who you choose to work with. Most companies will bank on the fact that you do not know the ins and outs of the payment card industry and will more than likely throw out a "low" rate because they know thats what you want to hear or offer you some other ploy to get you to sign up with them. This is a dangerous position for you to be in because in most cases you will be very disappointed when you receive your first bill and realize you have a $800 cancelation fee. Square may NOT be the best solution for an optometric practice that does more than $1000 per week in credit card volume, which most do.

You want to be with a company that knows your industry and thats 100% transparent as far as fees go. Feel free to reach out to me and let me just show you what it would look like if we were working together. Let me show you how a true interchange pricing program could save you a tremendous amount of money and what a virtual terminal can do be connecting to your website to enable online transactions.

Also, you all need to be aware that in 2015 (oct) banks will start issuing all of us new credit cards with a micro chip embedded. This will help reduce fraud in a big way. It will also require you to have a terminal that accepts those cards (EMV). I will post more info on this topic in a separate thread. In the meantime feel free to reach out to me directly. 877-583-1222

Michael
www.odpayments.com

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Originally Posted by DanLiv

The simplest online payment and mobile payment processors are not cheap. You pay for the convenience. Paypal and Squares fees are 2.9% and 2.75%, plus I believe about $0.30 transaction fee. Our standard processor charges just 1.9$+$0.30, 30% less. For day to day the traditional methods are still most competitive for anything but the tiniest or mobile/internet businesses. We do use PayPal occasionally for online billing and invoicing to make it as easy as possible for people to pay us. They are more likely to pay when it's just a click than when they have to call or receive a call from our office.

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