Hi I am not sure what state you are from but I found Bancard in MA and they foer the first year charged us $100.00 to set up the account, $35.00 to rent there machine for the night and that months processing fee was $10.00 OK Then this year After freezing the acct last april. Called bancard told them I would like to reopen the acct. in March , They charged us $10.00 that month and no rental on machine because I am an existing acct. The % was 1.59 and a 25 cent charge per order. We had $20,000 on credit cards WELL WORTH THE CHARGE!And now we are set up with an acct and never have to pay the $100.00 set up fee again. We can open this acct for any fundraisor we want for the $10.00 monthly processing fee.
Sorry for the confusion. Let's see if I can explain this better. We borrowed a credit card manual swiper (the old fashioned kind that only takes an imprint of the card) for the night of the auction. As people came into the auction we swiped their card, got their signature, attached it to an invoice slip, and filed both according to their bidding number. A side note: we had preprinted labels with peoples bidding number, address and phone etc. We obtained this information when we sold the tickets. For those that bought at the door we printed a label and assigned a bidding number there at the spot.
People tended to stagger their arrival time so we felt this was an easier way. As silent/live bids were closed we filed the bidding sheets in the winning bidders file (all done by file number). At the end of the night we tallyed everything on the invoice slip and the charge slip. Most people checked out so we were able to give them both their credit card receipt and an invoice slip with schools name on it. Over the next couple of days one person processed all the credit slips. The charge was (if I recall) around 3% which was peanuts compared to how much people charged. Our auction netted around $34,000 so it was very worthwhile!! Our checkout went very smoothly and quickly which left people with a GOOD memory of the event. If checkout is a nightmare this is the last impression you leave them with.
As a side note: we printed in our program that credit card purchases would be listed as "stampin up", we also informed the purchaser as they swiped their card. No one seemed to care about this at all especially since they had a written invoice with the school name on it.
I hope I made this a little bit clearer.
We hired a pro to set up our PTO as a merchant with the credit card companies and then be the go between for the transactions-at a fee. Our big problem was that he assured us we could do the validations online with the electronic terminal he rented us as part of our package. OOPS!! Immedidately, we realized as we had a big crowd of people waiting to check out that the dial-up validation would never work. Each time you process a card, the reader must make a telephone call, connect to the credit card compnay, etc. Way too much time!! and only one card at a time. We immediately switched to manually swiping the cards (on the gizmo he included in our package) and just writing in the amounts. That went fine.
The next day, our chairperson had to key the transactions in manually. Our contract stipulated we would be charged one fee if we sent the transactions in via the electronic reader (which was impossible)and a higher fee if we hand-entered them. Even though we did the typing and the transactions were in fact sent electronically, he charged us the higher fee (something to watch out for).
We chose not to use someone else's credit card account, because then the buyer's credit card statement would show that they bought something from Pampered Chef, for example, instead of from XYZ PTO. We also got monthly charges from AmEx for several months since we were set up as a merchant with them. It wasnt' until we assured them that this was basically a one-time set up that they cancelled this charge.
Would we use credit cards again - ABSOLUTELY. I'm sure it increased our sales volume. But, I would consider the "pre-swipe" idea that Momof3boys described. At least, I wouldn't waste any time trying to set up the electronic swiper for that night.
I'm sure fees vary, but we paid 2-3% per transaction, plus a $105 set up fee. In the end, it cost our auction $755 on credit card sales of over $19,000. It was definately worth the hassle.
Okay momof3boys it's been a long day and I want to make sure I understand this...
You can borrow or rent a credit card machine to run cards...who do you rent this from?
You ran the cards ahead of time, and parents recieve theit copy later, how? By mail, through their teacher...??
Please forgive me for asking but how much did it cost to do all this and was it worth it?
I'm getting ready to go to our school and pitch the idea of an auction and this might help. You really did make sense I've been up too long and was at school ALL DAY!! [img]smile.gif[/img]
Hi there,
We swiped at the beginning to save time. If someone didn't buy anything they just left and we tore up their slip. If they did buy something we processed their slip more quickly because we already had swiped their card had all their information and had their signature. We just needed to tally up their items hand them over and send them on their merry way. Some people didn't even wait for us to tally up their items just asked me to leave a carbon copy for them at the school and just took their items and we processed the card the next day. This involved some trust on both parties - one trust that the card would actually go thru and not be rejected and two trust that we wouldn't charge someone too much or falsely. We actually processed the charges the next day. We lucked out we only had one card rejected and this was easily followed up on afterwards. It's kind of confusing to explain via typing sorry! Hope this helps. We had an individual file for each bidder number where we kept their credit card slip. When silent auction tables were closed we had runners bring the sheets to the checkout and file the bid sheets by bidder number. HOpe this helps.
