Hi WebPro Readers,

We made a decision in 1996 to accept credit cards - the major ones and incurred various expenses.

We had a choice of buying or leasing an electronic terminal. But since we mostly attend craft fairs held in parks, open fields or in the middle of a street, we had no convenient access to electrical power or telephones. Therefore, we chose to buy a manual imprinter ("knuckle buster") and a software program to process sales on our home computer. Costs included: software, a manual imprinter and it's attachable plate.

We have since seen other crafters with 12-volt car batteries coupled to a converter running their electronic terminal and a radio transmitter; others have used a combination of a cellular phone and another type of electronic terminal to facilitate the on-the-scene swiping of the customer's card. Some of these terminals cost anywhere from $950 on up depending on how you want the terminal to function. However if any craft fair is located in a dead zone as far as cellular phone reception is concerned that would be a problem.

Our agreement with the credit card processor also involved fees - which were directly proportional to the volume of sales, for example, if an average sale was $50, the discount fee that the processor charged would be between 1.7 to 3 percent. Since we could not swipe a card electronically at the time of sale, we could only enter in the sales data with the software when we returned home. This process is designated as a "manual key-in" and an additional non-qualifying fee of about 3 percent is charged!

The expense of the manual imprinter and the software, was part of the cost of our doing business. That's something you either pass onto your customers or you absorb it. However, if you are in a profit-oriented business, then you have to factor these types of expenses into your prices. After all, the acceptance of a credit card as payment is for the convenience of the purchaser vs. their tendering a check or cash.

In the credit card company merchant agreement there was a zero limit provision - in other words, we took the hit if a credit card was tendered in a fraudulent way. We had no recourse if the person had a stolen card or the account was over the its limit. We could only find this information out at the time when the transaction was entered into our computer. This would be later in the evening or when we returned home after a 2-day show. If we received a "declined" message i.e., the customer's account would then not accept the charges for whatever reason. Fortunately our experience has been only one deadbeat for less than $75.

The particular credit card processing company that we started with changed its terms from time to time, with the option of our opting out if we didn't accept the new rules.