a revelation, revolution and reward!

[oldlady]

i have a reputation here as totally computer illiterate and resistant to change.  all true.  

yesterday i attended an excellent street fair and was fortunate  to have my daughter help me with setup and breakdown plus getting food and doing breaks for me.  it was MARVELOUS!  in addition, she told me that i should use her VENMO account.  my reply was the usual, puzzled "what?"  

well, those of you who know about it do not need to hear that it was a a way customers could pay without any kind of machine and they did it all themselves.  that made the transaction very fast and it was extremely well received.   that is all i need to say.  lots of smiles all around.

[Hulk]

Thanks Lady!

I've five days to decide on a way to accept credit card payments - open studio tour is next weekend - will look into your suggestion, thank you.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

@oldlady, I am really overjoyed for you right now! Good for you!

For others investigating Venmo, I thought I’d do a bit of digging to see what the pros and cons are vs something like Square. I had to do a bit of digging, because Venmo isn’t available in Canada. From the looks of it, it supplies a service that most banks here do without involving a third party, and usually for no charge to use your own money securely.

Venmo is a division of PayPal. For anyone else not familiar, it started as a method to transfer money between family and friends, and has recently expanded into allowing people to transfer money to small businesses (here’s a more in-depth article). 

The big difference between a personal PayPal account and a Venmo account seems to be that Venmo doesn’t charge the sender of the money if they’re using money directly from a bank account or from a debit card. PayPal charges you to use money from a debit card. Both accounts charge for withdrawals from a credit card. There doesn’t seem to be a difference in fees on the vendor end. Venmo is bound to be more popular with your customers than PayPal because it’s cheaper for them. So it could be well worth offering this payment method for your customers.

One thing I notice that some of the articles I read that tended to be mentioned as an aside, but is significant for vendors is that Venmo doesn’t do chargebacks directly through the app: a customer has to go through their credit card company. How you feel about this will depend on what side of the transaction you’re on. PayPal is notorious for favouring the consumer over the merchant in all instances, even when there is admission of error or evidence of malfeasance from the consumer. PayPal has high merchant complaints because of this. 

I would suggest that anyone looking to set up a Venmo for business should make sure they set up the business account over the personal version, because taxes are a thing to be concerned with. According to this article from TurboTax, if you make more than 200 sales or 20K in a calendar year, P2P platforms like Venmo are obliged to report to the IRS. And mixing business and personal transactions winds up being a lot of work to sort out.

 

[oldlady]

i suggested it to our guild for the holiday sale and a real conversation started!   apathy is the usual reaction so it is nice to have a little life in the discussion.   the facts are that venmo is intended for individual use to occasionally transfer funds.   if you run a business with it without a business account, you are in trouble.   so now i can crawl back into my old, comfortable rut.

for an individual, several or lots of small transactions on the same day, could be from a yard sale, i am sure that is allowed.

[Mark C.]

Just a. note on Venmo-it used to be fee free and since PayPal bought them out it still is for awhile but fees will become more like Pay pal in future. or so I have heard

I'm a square fan and am sticking with  them.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

18 hours ago, oldlady said:

you run a business with it without a business account, you are in trouble. 

 I think some of it may be a matter of scale. The business account didn’t look a lot different than the personal one from a vendor point of view, and it doesn’t seem more complicated to use. It does seem to be aimed at small scale businesses or folks getting started. I don’t know what percentage of people in the US tend to pay with credit vs cash vs funds transfer, but 200 transactions per year on one payment method alone seems like a lot.

Another consideration on the pro side for venmo would be it’s processing fees. Venmo says their fees for businesses are 1.9% plus $0.10 per transaction. My location won’t let me search US Square fees, but here they’re 2.65% for in person chip insert or tap transactions. I only get charged a flat fee of $0.10 on debit card transactions. Square doesn’t make a report telling me debit vs credit card breakdown, but my personal effective fee rate this year is 1.78%. Debit card use here is very prevalent, because it’s so favourable to the customer. No one likes being charged to use their own money.

[Piedmont Pottery]

I have settled on Square for all my sales transactions.  I used the phone app for years and now use Square Terminal as my point of sale system in our brick&mortar gallery/studio.  There are a few primary advantages for our operating model that Square has.  First, I can import inventory items from a spreadsheet, and my price tag/barcode label software reads the same spreadsheet.  To add new items to inventory it's just a matter of editing the spreadsheet and uploading it to Square and then printing whichever price labels I need.  Another huge advantage is the helpfulness with accounting.  The native sales and transaction reports are useful for tracking sales, and more importantly, the square transactions are posted automatically to my QuickBooks software using a plug-in called CommerceSync.  CommerceSync charges $10/month, but has greatly reduced the time I have to spend on bookkeeping.  Additionally, Square offers the ability to incorporate e-commerce site development for no extra cost.  Square may not be the answer for everyone, but it's working well for me.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

I would not suggest substituting Venmo for Square. Square is a till and accounting system. Venmo is just one way of taking payments. I’d view Venmo as a convenience to offer your customer, much as we once viewed taking Square payments when that technology was new. If someone wanted to transfer you money via Venmo, I think it’s still advisable to enter it into Square for all the tracking and accounting purposes.

[oldlady]

thanks, callie.   the meeting to discuss the whole cashier process will be tomorrow.   at least there will be a discussion with lots of opinions.   we really only have a huge crowd at  one or two events a year, keeping 3 cashiers and 3 wrappers busy, busy, busy for at most 2 days.   the first morning is bedlam but i avoid visiting the sale that day so i have not been involved in the rush. we use square but the discussion will be about various ways of using it.  (don't ask me.)

since i am so bad at math, i am a wrapper and a walker, talker.   i help people find the kind of thing they want and offer to put their selections on our hold table so they have 2 hands free to shop more.  there are usually about 15 to 20 potters involved in the sale so it is really a good deal.  the bookkeeping is relatively fast and we know our total individual sales figure within a couple of days. i am grateful to be involved with these enterprising potters and appreciate getting a 1099 tax form for the year.

[Callie Beller Diesel]

@oldladyI hope it went well. 

It would be very easy to record venmo payments in square as either cash, or “other payment type.”

[oldlady]

the meeting went extremely well, not only will  we be using square but some details of how work is labeled were worked out.  we have a square expert and a shop owner who use it all the time so there should be no serious problems.  and we will purchase small lunch bags, the kind without bottoms, to "wrap" smaller items.  no more tearing large sheets of paper while customers wait. 

 there will be a session to train cashiers in the new method.  there was  universal acceptance of the improvement in knowing sales figures by the end of the last day!  WOOHOO!