On September 8th Square was down for almost an entire day – and we were just as frustrated as you. We work in antique stores ourselves (👋🏻 from Acme Antiques and Fredonia Vintage House), and having to switch to cash-only sales for an entire Thursday definitely cost us some sales that we couldn’t really afford to lose!

We’re not going to let that happen again.

Starting today, we’ve added the ability for Quail to take Manual Entry card payments that don’t go through Square, so if Square goes down again – or if you’re using a different card processor! – you can manually key in a customer’s card number to charge the card without needing to tap, dip, or swipe it with a physical card reader. Just select Manual Entry when a customer wants to pay by card, and type in their card number, CVV (the 3- or 4-digit short number), expiration, and zip code:

Manual entry card payments are processed under the hood by Stripe and a companion app we’ve build that we’re calling Payment Pigeon; you can set up a Payment Pigeon account by opening Linked Apps under Store in Quail and clicking the Click to Link button:

You’ll need to answer a couple of questions there, including how you want to handle the card processing fee, and then provide some information about you & your business – including your tax ID or social security number, I’m afraid – to Stripe so that they can verify you. We never see or store this information; it’s strictly held by Stripe! Once you’re verified, you can take card payments right from inside Quail that go straight into your bank account.

Speaking of which: setting up manual entry payments is free (both Stripe & Payment Pigeon are 100% free to set up!), but as with any other card processor there’s a per-charge fee on every card payment you take. Right now that’s 3.0% + 35¢ per charge. You don’t necessarily have to pay that fee, though; Payment Pigeon lets you automatically pass it on to the customer if you prefer.

Why is this more expensive than the Square Terminal?

Square’s fee for processing card payments via a Square Terminal is based on the rate that card issuers (like Visa, MasterCard, and Amex) charge for card-present-transactions. When a customer taps, dips, or swipes their card in a physical reader the rate that card issuers charge for taking the payment is dramatically lower, since it’s that much less likely that the payment is fraudulent.

Taking payments without a card reader is essentially no different to taking them over the internet, and so the issuers charge a base fee that’s correspondingly higher to cover the increased chance of fraud. We’re looking for ways to make this charge lower, but for now 3% is the lowest we’ve been able to get it. We’ll keep you posted if it changes!