Dealing with Customer Card Payments
From Monday March 1st Tish Tash Toys agents will no longer be required to pass on individual customer details when placing orders. You will simply place one order for all the items you require. You will receive the same level of discount as you currently do. This will save you a lot of time and make ordering much easier.
To further simplify ordering, head office will no longer be taking card payments from individual customers. You will just make one payment for your your online order. As a part of running your own self-employed enterprise, it will be your decision which payment methods you accept. You may choose to just take cheques or cash payments or you can set up your own card payment service.
One of the easiest ways to take card payments is to set up a Paypal account. These are free to set up. When you log into Paypal you can very simply request payments from people by emailing them. Your customers do not even need a Paypal account to pay in this way. They just pay using their card.
It’s even easier if your customer has a PayPal account – when they place their order with you – simply give them your email address and they send a payment to you. This has the added bonus of not dealing with people’s credit/debit cards, which of course has security implications. You can then give your customers the reassurance that you do not keep their card details (on bits of paper etc!)
So – when you are at a party or an event, all you need to do is ensure that those customers who wish to pay by card give you their email address on the order form – so you can email them their Paypal invoice. Our current order forms request card details which will change when we reprint them. In the meantime, ask customers to just provide an email NOT card details.
We think you will find it a lot easier to send a quick email to a customer who wants to pay by card rather than having to record and process complicated card details and all the card errors which often occur and can take several days to resolve!
An almost identical card payment service is available from Google Checkout. It depends which one you prefer.
You can of course just take cash payments, and cheques direct to yourself. You can also ask customers (who don’t carry enough cash) to make a simple online banking transfer – into your bank account. If you do large events – you can hire card terminals for the day. We’ve done this for baby shows etc – see 123 Send There is also an increasing number of options to take card payments via Smartphones eg i-phone or Blackberry’s.
Click here for more info on becoming an agent for Tish Tash Toys.
