One of the biggest and most important questions, when youâre starting a business, is âHow do I actually get paidâ. For centuries all you need was a wallet, and to collect cash. In the last 50 years things have changed, and in the last 2 years the change has accelerated tend fold. In this article weâll briefly run through how you can start taking payments, and what your options are to start a business on a budget.
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Youâll be able to get your hands on a card reader pretty easily today, with so many options available to you. iZettle, SumUp, Square, DoJo, Clover the list goes on.
The good news is because there is so much competition, the model has changed; 10 years ago you would have to pay ~ÂŁ150 to get your card reader and pay upfront. Today youâll usually be able to get your hands on a reader with no upfront fee, or at least something in the region of ÂŁ30-ÂŁ50.
Unfortunately, if youâre wanting to accept cards, there will always be a cost in some shape or form. Both the actual payment will have a transaction fee, and the device that youâll get paid with will cost either up front or with a subscription. When you speak with other businesses around youâll be able to find the odd bargain, but usually, youâll need to shell out something.
At Trilo weâve taken the view that you donât need a card reader, or any reader for that matter to get paid. You head to our till app, till.trilo.io, on your phone or tablet and can start taking payments. Thereâs no reader needed, and you wonât need to spend a penny on anything to get moving.
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Letâs find out what the best card readers out there are, and how Trilo and what we do shapes up vs them. Now one of the most satisfying things to happen when youâre shopping is to walk up to the till, pull out your phone and in a few seconds hear that beeep. As trivial as it sounds, very few card readers are fast enough to handle payment in a few seconds.
Another thing to be aware of is the connectivity and power of a card reader. Today very few people use chip and pin; the majority of payments that are processed are contactless. Thanks to the rather risky ÂŁ100 limit, weâll touch on that in another blog.
Leading the way here are Square and Zettle (or iZettle as they are more widely known). Both come at it from different directions but have good takes. A close third and fourth would be Dojo and SumUp. Then of course Trilo loses this race technically, as we donât have card readers⌠itâs just that easy.
Square tends to have its readers built into their POS systems; because of this theyâre very convenient if youâre set up and in place. If youâre more versatile, you can go old school and use Squareâs card reader thatâs a small white square. Old but powerful you canât really go wrong.
Zettle is on par and tends to have a card reader thatâs separate from the POS. A big win for Zettle is the card detection range (CDR) is almost twice that of most other readers. So much so that when I bought my coffee the other day I didnât have time to switch my card when I opened Apple Pay even though I was a foot away⌠(donât quote me on the distance claim)
SumUp and Dojo have good card readers, and you canât really go wrong with them either.
But please please please, if you do go down the card reader route, then avoid the black boxes of yesteryear. They are slow, low-powered and fail often.
With Trilo we donât use card readers, instead, youâre able to take payments with your phone, or tablet, or simply have QR codes for payments on products around your shop.
Weâve done this for a few reasons, from speed of launch (you can take payment with Trilo in less than 5 minutes), to costs (zero costs đ), and why would have chunks of plastic lying around when they are something holding on from the last century?
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Phone card readers are pretty new on the scene, with pin-on-glass as itâs known only really starting to be a thing in the last few years. The transaction fees for phone-based card readers tend to be similar to standard ePOS; youâll end up paying around 1.75% and then potentially a penny payment.
If we look at a Square payment vs a Trilo payment, this is where Trilo really comes into itâs own. When a Square payment costs you at least 1.75%, and it will take several days to arrive in your bank, Trilo doesnât have any costs at all.
The reason here is that cards have all sorts of middlemen, who charge anything from 0.1% to 1% each, which are all bundled into Squareâs fees. Whereas with Trilo, there are no middlemen; the money simply goes straight from your customer to you. This means
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All in all if you want to accept cards with an old-school plastic card reader you'll end up paying several different fees combined. If you want to overhaul and supercharge your business, then you'll be able to switch to Trilo and get paid immediately with zero costs up front and no transaction fees what so ever. As you know, we run on a simple subscription. Nothing more, nothing less, and most importantly no hidden snaky fees...
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