Recommendations for card payment services please!

Hilary, the first thing you need to do is estimate how much money you think you will transact by card payments. That is critical.

Then you have two main options:

a) to use a traditional merchant service like you see in regular high street shops etc ; or

b) to use a non traditional merchant service like iZettle or Paypal.

Typically the traditional merchant services like worldpay etc will render a one off charge for a payment machine then a monthly charge of about £15? - £20? per month to just use their facility and then a fee of typically 40 pence per debit card transaction and 1.5% for a credit card transaction. You need to guesstimate how much that would cost you therefore a typicalmonth (not easy I know ).

Then you need to compare that with the non traditional merchants like iZettle or Paypal both of whom still take debit card payments and debit card payments and will however charge in the region of 2.75% per transaction regardless of whether it is a debit card or credit card.

With iZettle and payapl they have nifty devices that bluetooth connect to your mobile phone and can do contactless payments, and the usual pin entered transactions. They also can automatically send confirmation of the receipt and even provide an invoice if you wish there and then.

I think the iZettle and paypal devices cost about £99.

So your question to yourself is what is the value of the transactions. The few the transactions and the lower the value of the payment, the more likely it will be that the non traditional merchant services will save you money. Conversely, the higher the number of the transactions, and the higher the value per transaction the more likely the traditonal merchant services will save you money.

I have fewer transactions and lower payments amounts and therefore ended up using Paypal and have been hapy enough with it. It was easy also to connect my paypal to my website andreceieve payments from clients online too.

Frankly, when I get a client who wants to pay a larger bill I "encourage" them to pay by BACS and that is of course free of charge and most are happy to oblige.

Finally, I would say that if you do go for a traditiona merchant service, then chshop around as their rates do rates and costs do vary not insignificantly. They will also try to tie you into longer term contracts, some, I have heard were 5 years (but you got a better rates as a consequence).

I hope that helps.

Shak

Thank you so much, Shak....you are the oracle! That all helps enormously. I didn't know it was possible to use Paypal in this way. Given most transactions will be for bitesize chunks of Children Act litigation, I am veering towards that solution - particularly as it can be linked to a website for online payment too but I'll do some sums!!

As you say, larger payments from clients can be encouraged via BACS, so I will be using card payments more for those clients from whom I want payment on the day.....eg. fixed fee meetings. Taking cash is a pain for me now (which is currently the norm for fixed fees) as my local branch of HSBC which was next door to my office closed recently, meaning a 45 minute round trip into the next town. So I am trying to avoid that - the value of my 45 mins alone will be worth the transaction fees.

Thanks so much.

Hils

Then especially if you have iPhone it is paypal or iZettle all day long. Perhaps with a handheld device to make it super quick.

We dont even have a hand held device, in the meeting area we have a laptop and get the client to go onto our website, go to the payments page and pay online and hey presto. They then get used to the idea of paying online and if they want, we show them how. The double bonus for us is that we get more vists to the webste when they pay from home and that improves our ranking.

Thats a win win for us all round.

(makes a change for once!)

Shak

Sounds brilliant and exactly what I need! Thanks so much.....big problem solved this week! I will get on it!

Ok, so I have a quick question on the card payment issue - presumably whichever facility you use has to be set up on the client bank account, rather than office, so that clients can use it to pay unpaid professional disbursements, court fees, payments on account etc. - in which case, does Paypal credit the account with all the money paid by a client (enabling the transaction charges to be debited separately out of office account)? Or do you literally only use it for payment of pure profit costs? Thanks so much!