Sandi, thanks for taking time to comment. One problem with surveying your existing customers is that you don’t take cards now. That means people who have a very strong preference have already taken their business elsewhere without ever telling you. So your survey misses the potential customers you might be losing by not accepting cards. I think it’s very wise to consider accepting cards for all your services when you start your gift store.

Because the difference in your cost would be less than 3%, it’s not that hard to work in a very small price increase to cover the cost. Or consider moving to Dwolla which would have a much lower cost of 25 cents per transaction.

The “audits” your bank is charging for is probably PCI compliance. (You can learn all about it from the PCI Security Standards Council, but it’s very boring stuff.) In short, it’s the industry standard for securing customer credit card data. Various credit card processors handle PCI compliance in different ways. My old fashioned traditional merchant account relied on me to secure the data at my end, required that I complete their survey to prove it, and then charged me $10 per month to certify me as PCI compliant. That is in fact what drove me to find Square as an alternative to them. With Square, the PCI compliance is designed into the service. With my current service Payment Revolution, once again PCI compliance is built in and does not cost extra. To find out how any other online service handles this, go to their help or support area and search for “PCI compliance.” Under no circumstances should a small independent gift store be paying $20,000 for audits to ensure PCI compliance. I’m guessing that reflects what the bank itself would pay for an outside audit of their own PCI compliance.

All these systems accept debit cards right along with credit cards. Debit cards are treated just the same as credit cards when you make a sale. In some cases, the debit cards are charged a different rate, but there is nothing you have to do at your end. The system manages that automatically.

Julie, I personally had no problems with Square. They did not ever hold our money or create any other problem in our business.

Here’s what I would do if I were you. I would go down this list of alternatives. I’d look for a phone number for customer service or at least sales. I’d call and ask about how they’d handle these situations. Then I’d also check the others on this list: A Rundown of Square + Six Other Smartphone Credit Card Readers at SmallBusiness.com. If you can’t get someone on the phone now, you probably can’t get someone on the phone when the chips are down.

Dwight, I’m excited you have more alternatives now. Be sure to compare the effective rates, taking into account all the fees. That’s what makes the difference.

Great question, Geoff. I’ll see what our smart friends can come up with.

Here’s the story, as promised: How we switched to an iPad Point-of-Sale system.

I look forward to hearing that! We started using Square as our POS system in July. There was a small sales tax increase here and I didn’t want the run-around of trying to reprogram the rates in our aging Sharp cash register. It was so easy to make those changes with Square. Today, we use our cash register only for its secure cash drawer!