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Taking payments by credit card


Will

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The question of taking payments by card often seems to crop up. But the cost of renting the equipment etc seems to put most B&B owners off. This may be of interest: www.payatrader.com.

I don't know if it works, or is available, for French bank accounts and/or credit cards, but may be worth looking at for dealing with UK customers. It seems to be aimed at providers of household services rather than B&B/holiday let owners, but don't see why I shouldn't work for you.

I also saw something recently that looked similar, but worked with a mobile phone. I should have made a note of the name.

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Paypal charges from 3.4% (+20p transaction charge) but .....Payatrader also have a £99 joining fee (!) and a +30p transaction charge on top of their 2.7%. Both offer descending interest charges based on turnover.

Google checkout pretty similar at 3.4% descending + 20p transaction charge and no joining fee.

Google and Paypal are of course Global.

Chiefluvvie

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those figures sound extortionate... I pay 0.45% + 5ct per transaction... okay there is the hire of the machine at 18€/month but I have read you can get a cheap one on ebay.

I would not be happy to pay that sort of percentage for all the hard work it takes to run a hospitality business for very little service.

In fact I think the odd euro for a card transaction is worth it as you have peace of mind that you have the money and not a cheque that bounces or that you have added up the cash wrong.. or a counterfeit 100€ note.

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[quote user="osie"]those figures sound extortionate... I pay 0.45% + 5ct per transaction... okay there is the hire of the machine at 18€/month but I have read you can get a cheap one on ebay.

I would not be happy to pay that sort of percentage for all the hard work it takes to run a hospitality business for very little service.

In fact I think the odd euro for a card transaction is worth it as you have peace of mind that you have the money and not a cheque that bounces or that you have added up the cash wrong.. or a counterfeit 100€ note.
[/quote]

With respect your running  a gite, restaurant and hotel, not quite the same as a Chambres D'hote. You will of course be TVA registered and also be a company and your turnover will be considerably more than that of a CDH so you will benefit from rates we cannot attain. Indeed many banks won't even give a CDH a merchants account unless you register as a full blown business in which case you loose the benefit of the 71% tax allowance which for many of us means we hardly ever pay tax and only pay minimum social contributions.

Only had one cheque bounce in ten years and that has now been dealt with, cash never adds up wrongly because we are computerised (for on the fly transactions, drinks etc, it updates through any Android device done at POS) and we only accept notes of 100 Euros plus the day before so we can have them checked by the bank. You can of course buy a forged note detector which only costs 69 Euros which is four months worth of machine rental money. Once you have it you would save 216 Euros a year of hard earned money. [;-)]

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Hi Quillan

I was not questioning other payment methods.. cheque, cash etc.  I was just saying that I would not accept 3% of my work going to pay for having the use of a credit card, irrespective of my turnover.  If that was the case then I would not consider going down that path... On the other hand I was saying that for 0.5% I would have piece of mind as I prefer to inhibit human error as much as possible.. including the cash being nicked or falling out ones pocket.

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Well being Jewish money NEVER falls out of my pocket. [;-)] I think you are talking quit differently about how you operate to how a CDH operates so you can't really draw any comparison. We only accept deposits by credit card as I refuse to pay for the rental of any machine be it physical or virtual (PayPal and other companies offer virtual terminals). The sums involved are, for us, the first nights accommodation plus any meals on the first night so we are talking about around €110 max and I can swallow a couple of Euros compared to loosing €110 for a 'no show'. We never take final payment by any card method, it's either French bank cheque (and believe me you don't want to bounce one of those), cash or bank transfer all of which cost nothing.
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