UPDATE:

Below is the original article I posted on the Square App credit card processing application.  It seems the whole thing was rolled out way premature.  CEO Jack Dorsey (no relation) simply couldn’t put out the swipe hardware out quick enough.  I still haven’t received mine. It’s been months, but what’s really killing Square is there credit liability insurance. It seems as though they had no idea that we’d want to charge more than $100 a week.  In this case, Square management needed to be more afraid of success rather than failure, because success is what’s drowning them.  Here is a delightfully frank email from Square management to those who signed up.

Dear Square user,

We announced Square with the phrase: “0 to $60 in under 10 seconds.”

Square’s goal is to enable people to accept payments immediately, everywhere. We realize the amount of time we’ve taken to ship our Square readers has been frustrating, sometimes confusing, and has generated a number of questions. When we announced the company last December, we estimated Square would be ready in the U.S. sometime in early 2010. Since then, we’ve let our excitement get the best of us and have released parts of Square before they were fully baked.

A recent email from our support team to a Square user sums up where we are:

Until recently, we were facing a big hardware shortage, but that is now resolved (we sent our co-founder Jim to China for a couple weeks to arrange better manufacturing, and that did the trick). The problem has transitioned to something we’ve been working on simultaneously, a credit processing and risk issue. We need to strengthen our underwriting infrastructure so that we can handle the huge demand for readers and still manage the risk of chargebacks and fraud. This is the last thing preventing us from shipping readers as fast as we’d like, and we have pretty much the entire team working on it.

The way we are handling the risk of chargebacks and fraud is through transaction limits, but we have received feedback that those limits are too low. We are rethinking and expanding our underwriting infrastructure to address this issue. As soon as we finish, we will send you an email to confirm that you would like us to run a credit check (or you can cancel your request to process cards with Square which will securely remove your personal information). We will then ship your free card reader and activate your account to accept card payments.

We thank you for your continued patience as we work to deliver a utility you can use every day and for allowing us the time to get it right.

Jack Dorsey
Square CEO

Below is my original article on Square App, posted a few months ago, if you want to read what all the fuss is about.

A lot of us, including my studio already have been accepting credit card payments from clients for a while, but never has it been this easy. The inventor of Twitter brings us The Square app for iPhone and Android. Square allows you to swipe a clients credit card using a small attachment to the headphone jack of the phone (see below.)  Don’t have the free hardware on you? No problem. You can manually enter the info in as well.  A receipt is emailed to you and the client whilst the transaction information is stored on their website.

If you’re a very new production company or a freelancer, I would suggest you look at this app for taking payments. Of course there are fees, but there are NO MONTHLY FEES NO CONTRACTS, NO MINIMUM CHARGES, which is huge, worthy of the all caps. Our credit card merchant currently charges us $20 a month on top of the per transaction percentage (which is pretty low due to the volume and years of use.) Square offers a 2.75% fee for swiped cards and 3.5% for manually entered cards. The reason for the price difference is a security issue. There is much less of a chance of a chargeback when one physically swipes the card. This is exactly what Visa/MC does to anyone’s rate who doesn’t use one of those little machines to swipe. I enter card numbers manually at work, so we pay a slightly higher percentage, but since all of our clients pay over the phone, I’d never physically have the card to swipe anyway. It should be noted that Paypal charges are very similar for Virtual Terminal (the ability to manually enter cards), but you have to pay $30 monthly. Our office used this for awhile and hated it.

You will need a phone with iPhone OS or Android on it, but who doesn’t have one of those yet (Walter)? iPad has an app too. There have been complaints on the App store reviews stating that there is a $100 maximum transaction limit, but this is only during the setup phase credit check. Once you’ve been cleared, Square will setup limitations based on your volume and credit qualifications. This could be a major boondoggle (sp) depending on how they set you up.

Television production is expensive, so I’d anticipate your credit card charges will be substantial, especially if you’re in the consumer side of the production market i.e weddings and events.

Side note: Some gigs come up quickly, and sometimes they’re with first time clients. It is customary to get a deposit on these projects. Once they’ve established they’re not deadbeats, you can take a check.

Another bonus. Your friend’s freeloading ways are over. Your friend Casey forgot to get cash for pizza. No worries. Swipe his card, and tell him you know he does that crap on purpose. Buddy Rich wants to get tickets to the game; you’ve got to all pay together if you want to sit together.  Swipe your card at the box office, then his on your Square App. Nice.

I just signed up, so I can’t give a full review, but I’ll be back with an update once I get going.

Square Swipe thingy

PS:  The inventor of Twitter and Square has the surname Dorsey.  This sealed the deal for me.