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usbswiper.com -- take paypal in person. LOL
 

There's a new product out USBSwiper.com - PayPal Payments Pro Point of Sale Credit Card Swiping Solutions that lets people swipe their credit card and that goes to your paypal account (rather than a merchant account) and so they pay you credit card via paypal. You get their signature (maybe?) and even if you do, paypal never honors it as they only honor electronic proof so the buyers get their item, then file a paypal dispute for "not received" and get a free item.

It's funny I stumbled across this message. I've actually been using usbswiper for awhile now and have indeed had people submit charge-backs. The thing is, they paid with a credit card, not with PayPal. As such, they submit their charge-back through their own card company just like they could/would no matter who you use to process the card.

Also, because of the fact that I had a signed receipt proving authorization to charge the card for the amount specified the credit card company sided with me. It took about 2 months to get it done, but PayPal had nothing to do with it.

That looks nifty for small stores, I wouldn't mind having something like that.

jeffbred24, are you saying that when pay credit card through that, it's not linked to their paypal account so they can't log in and make a dispute in paypal?

On their list of fees Total Merchant Service Solution : Save Over Traditional Bank Merchant Accounts! : USBSwiper.com it's similar to a swiped merchant account.

One time fee:
USBSwiper One-Time Single License Fee $197.00

Monthly Fees

USBSwiper Monthly Fee $4.95
PayPal Virtual Terminal Monthly Fee $30.00


Their per transaction fees are then pretty much based on what you'd get for stuff over the internet with paypal.

Now this is more expensive than some swiped merchant account. The only fees you'd save are that you don't have fees if the customer's card is declined.


However their benefits are good: What are Some Advantages of Using PayPal as a Credit Card Processing Merchant? : USBSwiper.com

I don't know what it costs to get a manual swiped system and it could be expensive. But maybe not.

The fact that paypal discount charge higher rates for rewards cards helps. With a merchant account, it's about 5% per transaction. The fact that paypal refunds your fees when you refund a person helps.

However for the benefit, they claim you get notified right away of chargebacks. That's actually not so. It's the banks that decide when to notify people. So far I've found that Chase notifies merchants right away and all other banks wait about 2 months to notify merchants.

I really don't know how paypal will handle the freezing of accounts and the tracking #s and the "not as described so ship it back" disputes. It really depends if paypal is clued into the fact that it's being used on person.

jeffbred24, what have you found?

usbswiper
 

Yes. Unless the buyer happens to know that USBSwiper works through PayPal they have no idea PayPal is even involved. They don't have to have a PayPal account to pay me. They just hand me their card anywhere else and the money drops into my PayPal account (instantly, which is nice).

Their per transaction fees are indeed what PayPal offers. As the seller, PayPal is my actual "merchant". USBSwiper seems to be just more of an add-on than anything else. PayPal doesn't offer swiping capabilities so they created it.

The thing that I found out when I started shopping around is that even though my previous merchant claimed to be giving me 1.8% on card swipes that was far from the truth. Cards like amex, discover, corporate cards, and others get flagged as what they call "non-qualified" cards and are often charged around 3.5%. When I avg. that out over the course of a month I'm actually getting around 2.8% or so. With PayPal I'm getting 2.5% no matter what, and the refunded fees helps too like you mentioned.

I haven't had a whole bunch of charge-backs go by, but the times it's happened I was notified relatively quickly. Basically, immediately upon notification being sent to PayPal that a chargeback has occured they send notification to me. In fact, I'm using their IPN system so it really does happen instantly. Now, if the card-issuing bank doesn't notify PayPal then I guess I wouldn't get that notice as quickly. I'll send an email to usbswiper and see what they have to say about that.

PayPal themselves won't honor seller protection when items are picked up in person. However, that's not really an issue here because like I mentioned before the buyer doesn't actually file their complaint with PayPal anyway. They file it with their own card issuing bank. I get my notice through PayPal that the problem has occured, however, I typically deal directly with the card-issuing bank and send them all of the documentation they request myself. I can't say I've got a 100% success rate but most of the time I win the case with a signed receipt.

What's their "IPN system"?

ipn
 

IPN is Instant Payment Notification, although, it happens for more than just payments. Anytime a payment, refund, dispute, new subscription sign-up, subscription cancelation, etc. happens with your account data about that transaction will be posted to your IPN listener script that just sits there and waits for data to be pushed to it. There's a little post-back call that verifies it actually came from PayPal and then you can do whatever you want with that data to automate tasks like sending emails to customers, yourself, updating a database, etc. It's very useful. In fact one of things I've done with it is automate sending an email receipt to every person I swipe a card for. :)

You can find more information about it here.