Evolving technology
Jul. 20th, 2016 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntrI'm not sure how I got to this place. It feels a little like a Panda's Thumb situation, evolution not to the best possible result, but the workable one that uses all the bits I already have. Or maybe I'm just cheap.
I didn't actually accept credit cards for the first several years I sold pottery. I would have had to get a different bank account (credit unions don't count for merchant banking), get a machine, pay a monthly fee. I just didn't see how it would be worth my while, especially since many of my shows (Saturday Market, Clay Fest, Ceramic Showcase) would process cards for me.
Eventually, I worked out a compromise. I took duplex credit/debit forms on the road with me, and gave the completed charge slips to Saturday Market when I got home. They took 5%, but it was still cheaper than getting my own set-up.
Enter Square. It's a smart phone app and plug-in device that read the magstripe on a credit or debit card. You can set it up with pre-programmed product buttons or just type in numbers, it has a sales-tax add-on feature, and it will deposit your sales, less their (smaller than Market's) percentage direct to your bank in a couple of working days.
And the app and reader? Free.
I'd only just gotten a cell phone a few years previously, for use at road shows. For under $30, I upgraded to a smart(ish) Android that turned out not to run Square. Sigh. But before I could replace it, a new update came out that did work. I was on my way!
Of course, I didn't always have a signal. And occasionally, my battery would run down before the show ended. I kept the duplex forms, and put in sales manually later. (For a higher fee, but still cheaper than running through Saturday Market.) Eventually learned to turn off the wifi, as searching for a signal was running out the battery. Also found a portable recharger on sale at Office Max that holds two full charges. And Square did an update with an off-line mode that would store transactions when the cell signal failed, and upload them when I connected again later.
So I was happy for several years, through multiple software upgrades and three different under-$30 phones. (One flat-out died, one didn't Square, so I traded it in for a different model.)
And then the Chip happened.
Chip readers aren't free. The cheapest, a plug-in model with two slots, one magstripe and one chip, cost about as much as my smartish phone. (The fancier Bluetooth model that also accepts wireless payments is twenty bucks more.) Both need to be charged before use. I bit the bullet and ordered the cheap one, only to find that it only worked intermittently on my phone, and took forever to process when it did, because of back-and-forth confirmation with the bank. I though I'd have to get a pricier phone.
And then I remembered that there's free public wifi at Saturday Market (and at Corvallis Fall Festival, the only road show I had last year post-chip). I'd bought myself a tablet as a plaything a few birthdays ago, a high-end Samsung that ran Square and wifi. Hooray! I tried it in Corvallis, where it worked beautifully, and also the rest of Saturday Market, Holiday Market, and into this spring.
And so we came to Roseburg, the Umpua Valley Summer Arts Festival. Turns out they didn't have wifi this year.
Square did work on my phone, but not fast and not well. Reader needed to be rebooted every time the phone went to sleep, and that took forever. A couple of connections got dropped and needed to be rerun. I spent a lot of time apologizing to customers and cursing under my breath. Wishing I'd paid for an iPhone.
Well, no, not really, but seriously wondering how much I'd have to pay for a good enough phone to solve these problems. But I hated to toss an otherwise workable phone. Panda's Thumb, remember? Evolution doesn't back up.
Enter this tiny bit of technology: A portable wifi hotspot. I got introduced to this model, from FreedomPop, at Art and the Vineyard, where it was running our Square devices with a good strong signal. It even came with a free smart phone (though that offer had ended by the time I ordered mine). Still, it was less than the cost of my cell phone--You see a pattern here? I'll try anything if it's under thirty bucks--with free shipping, a free gigabyte of data the first month, and free data period if I change to the 200Mb/month plan before the month ends. Which should be easily enough for me, as I don't plan to stream movies, just credit card numbers.
Tried it last weekend in Salem, and it worked a charm. Good strong signal, fast processing. I still need to unplug and reboot the reader when I wake up the tablet, but if I do that before I wrap the pots, I'm ready to take the card by the time I'm done.
I didn't actually accept credit cards for the first several years I sold pottery. I would have had to get a different bank account (credit unions don't count for merchant banking), get a machine, pay a monthly fee. I just didn't see how it would be worth my while, especially since many of my shows (Saturday Market, Clay Fest, Ceramic Showcase) would process cards for me.
Eventually, I worked out a compromise. I took duplex credit/debit forms on the road with me, and gave the completed charge slips to Saturday Market when I got home. They took 5%, but it was still cheaper than getting my own set-up.
Enter Square. It's a smart phone app and plug-in device that read the magstripe on a credit or debit card. You can set it up with pre-programmed product buttons or just type in numbers, it has a sales-tax add-on feature, and it will deposit your sales, less their (smaller than Market's) percentage direct to your bank in a couple of working days.
And the app and reader? Free.
I'd only just gotten a cell phone a few years previously, for use at road shows. For under $30, I upgraded to a smart(ish) Android that turned out not to run Square. Sigh. But before I could replace it, a new update came out that did work. I was on my way!
Of course, I didn't always have a signal. And occasionally, my battery would run down before the show ended. I kept the duplex forms, and put in sales manually later. (For a higher fee, but still cheaper than running through Saturday Market.) Eventually learned to turn off the wifi, as searching for a signal was running out the battery. Also found a portable recharger on sale at Office Max that holds two full charges. And Square did an update with an off-line mode that would store transactions when the cell signal failed, and upload them when I connected again later.
So I was happy for several years, through multiple software upgrades and three different under-$30 phones. (One flat-out died, one didn't Square, so I traded it in for a different model.)
And then the Chip happened.
Chip readers aren't free. The cheapest, a plug-in model with two slots, one magstripe and one chip, cost about as much as my smartish phone. (The fancier Bluetooth model that also accepts wireless payments is twenty bucks more.) Both need to be charged before use. I bit the bullet and ordered the cheap one, only to find that it only worked intermittently on my phone, and took forever to process when it did, because of back-and-forth confirmation with the bank. I though I'd have to get a pricier phone.
And then I remembered that there's free public wifi at Saturday Market (and at Corvallis Fall Festival, the only road show I had last year post-chip). I'd bought myself a tablet as a plaything a few birthdays ago, a high-end Samsung that ran Square and wifi. Hooray! I tried it in Corvallis, where it worked beautifully, and also the rest of Saturday Market, Holiday Market, and into this spring.
And so we came to Roseburg, the Umpua Valley Summer Arts Festival. Turns out they didn't have wifi this year.
Square did work on my phone, but not fast and not well. Reader needed to be rebooted every time the phone went to sleep, and that took forever. A couple of connections got dropped and needed to be rerun. I spent a lot of time apologizing to customers and cursing under my breath. Wishing I'd paid for an iPhone.
Well, no, not really, but seriously wondering how much I'd have to pay for a good enough phone to solve these problems. But I hated to toss an otherwise workable phone. Panda's Thumb, remember? Evolution doesn't back up.
Enter this tiny bit of technology: A portable wifi hotspot. I got introduced to this model, from FreedomPop, at Art and the Vineyard, where it was running our Square devices with a good strong signal. It even came with a free smart phone (though that offer had ended by the time I ordered mine). Still, it was less than the cost of my cell phone--You see a pattern here? I'll try anything if it's under thirty bucks--with free shipping, a free gigabyte of data the first month, and free data period if I change to the 200Mb/month plan before the month ends. Which should be easily enough for me, as I don't plan to stream movies, just credit card numbers.
Tried it last weekend in Salem, and it worked a charm. Good strong signal, fast processing. I still need to unplug and reboot the reader when I wake up the tablet, but if I do that before I wrap the pots, I'm ready to take the card by the time I'm done.