A great new payment option is Stripe – it is a Payment Gateway which means you can sell stuff online, take credit cards on your site yet avoid any recurring monthly fees. I have not used it but hope to try it soon. Has anyone out there used it with WordPress? WPEC is often set up with PayPal Payments Pro but that’s $30/month so not a great option for smaller scale merchants.
Here’s a great summary of services that more or less copy Square – they take payments on a mobile phone. Article courtesy of David Pogue’s blog. He also talks about Square’s in-store payment system.
Intuit offers something called GoPayment, with a rather huge phone attachment and a complicated rate structure. It advertises a 2.7 percent rate, but the fine print reveals that you’ll pay 3.7 percent for reward cards, American Express and corporate cards.
A company called mPower is aimed at big companies that want the money to flow directly into their own accounts — not be deposited first into a holding account, as Square, Intuit and others do. PayAnywhere’s notable feature is that it takes the lowest cut of all: 2.69 percent.
And then there’s the elephant that’s just barged into the room: PayPal. Its rate is a hair lower than Square’s 2.7 percent, and its reader is a triangle instead of a square. The reader is more stable than the Square when you swipe the card, but it’s relatively giant.
via As Pay-by-Phone Advances, Square Takes Another Leap – State of the Art – NYTimes.com.
update:
Read more and see fee options for other card readers for Stripe:
- Innerfence makes it easy to accept face-to-face payments with your Stripe account.
- CardFlight enables you to easily accept in-person payments in your own mobile application.
