Credit Card Acceptance/Imprinter and Merchant Plates

[andrewmeredith]

Hey everyone,

I've been running a business that's had strictly online sales, and am going to be promoting/selling at a festival soon. I wanted to be able to accept credit cards and was planning on borrowing a friend's Credit Card acceptor machine, and just found out I might not have a telephone hookup at my booth.

Have any of you had experience, or have any insight as to how I should go about accepting credit cards, namely if I can't use a regular CC terminal? Was thinking about buying/borrowing one of those manual slider/imprinters, but didn't really know the ins and outs of all that (do I really need to get a merchant card engraved? etc.)

I greatly appreciate any insight, thanks everyone

[Will]

In Australia there is a portable EFTPOS (what we call the machine which takes credit cards etc) machine which does not need to be plugged into anything. I am sure it would be everywhere else as well.

It looks just like the regular ones, though cordless. I am not sure how it works though they are definitely available, maybe a little expensive if you are not going to regularly need it... but worth checking out.

[andrewmeredith]

Awesome, yeah I've been perusing around the internet and saw some wireless terminals, pretty expensive though. Thanks for the insight, Will.

Was thinking about using the old-school manual sliding imprinter, anyone have good/bad experiences with those?