[hackerspaces] Merchant Service Account Reccomendations

[Rhys Rhaven]

Wepay kept emailing our directors list with HEY YOU SHOULD USE US and we
had to tell them to go away multiple times. This isn't surprising as
most all the financial industry is evil.

I'm a System's Administrator for a smallish (~100 people) credit card
processor here in Chicago. We have a lot of hacker friendly people in
IT. So I've been thinking for a while I should try to setup something in
our company that we can get hackerspaces accounts. We do the
underwriting inhouse most of the time. Problem is that while rate wise
we are cheaper than square, paypal, wepay, etc, our model is not all
that clear. Kinda like telco bills. There is a set amount of overhead to
have a merchant account. Different companies call the fees different
things, but overhead is still overhead.

What would be nice would be for a group like the School Factory to pay
for a general account that all other hackerspaces can process through.
Then all the spaces can get low rates and share the overhead cost.
Spaces would have to work together. Would anyone be interested in this?

On 10/31/2011 10:40 PM, Carlyn maw wrote:
> We aren't one yet. That is the problem. We are working on the
> paperwork, should be done by the end of the year. I'm not totally
> freaking out about paypal because we were on the path anyway and we'll
> get it back. (I've been on the phone with them 3 times) But if we
> hadn't been. Yikes. Now we just want alternatives.
>
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Psy Tek <psytek at alphaonelabs.com
> <mailto:psytek at alphaonelabs.com>> wrote:
>
>     I've heard good things about https://www.wepay.com/  also as long
>     as you're a registered non-profit (you don't need to be 501c3),
>     you can use a non-profit Paypal account.  Call them and they can
>     work something out with your account if you have the incorporation
>     and tax id.
>
>
>     On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Carlyn maw
>     <carlynorama at gmail.com <mailto:carlynorama at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>         Yeaaahhhh... we goofed and used the donate button to collect
>         money and got frozen there... we'll get it back because we
>         actually are going the 501(c)3 route, but we're temporarily
>         hosed. Hence the need for merchant services/gateway asap.
>
>
>         On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Chris Weiss <cweiss at gmail.com
>         <mailto:cweiss at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>             At ArchReactor we've been using Square (
>             https://squareup.com/ ) for
>             in person CC payment.  Not heard any complaints yet.  Best
>             part is
>             that if you have a smartphone, the hardware is free.  They
>             don't have
>             a e-commerce api though, so no web based payments, still
>             using paypal
>             for that.
>
>             On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 9:27 PM, Carlyn maw
>             <carlynorama at gmail.com <mailto:carlynorama at gmail.com>> wrote:
>             > So CRASH Space just tried to get a merchant services
>             account via
>             > dharmamerchantservices.com
>             <http://dharmamerchantservices.com> and they were cool,
>             but their under writing bank
>             > (Moneris) was freaked out by the fact that we, gasp,
>             taught lock picking and
>             > associated with "hackers." I think it is kinda funny.
>             > They are going to put us in touch with someone else,
>             although it is likely
>             > we'll just go with our bank and sign up with
>             authorize.net <http://authorize.net> directly, but
>             > anyone have a credit card processing group they like?
>             Anyone know anything
>             > about http://beanstream.com/ ? I'm probably going to
>             call them tomorrow just
>             > to get a feel for them.
>             > Happy Halloween...
>             > Best,
>             > -- Carlyn
>             >
>             >
>             >
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