Square Payments

Square is a really amazing credit card processing, payment gateway, invoicing, booking, and product inventory management option for small to medium size businesses. The value of everything they provide for your to help run your business, beyond just credit card processing, is unmatched. While you are getting a very competitive processing rate, they offer you all of these other tools to run your business mostly for free. They also integrate with 3rd party applications in case they are missing a feature you need. The booking capability alone is worth the credit card processing fees you're paying.

There are a few limitations to some of the applications they offer but it's hard to complain because they are free AND they are constantly listening to their customers to make improvements on those applications. They do charge more if you want to keep your customers credit card on file for automatic payment or recurring billing which in my opinion is counter intuitive and unfair to the businesses using them because technically it means more easily processed payments they are making money on and it's not costing them any extra to process a card already on file. You are basically paying extra for the convenience.

It's easy to use. Your favorite device becomes your POS which is convenient especially for those of us who do work on the road.

You can get instant deposit with an extra fee which is nice.

I don't like their customer service. You have to pay extra to be able to call their customer service number and even if you do (because I did the trial for premium service), they don't really resolve anything.

I also don't like their dispute process. You get very limited time to submit your documentation proving the transaction was valid. Some paperwork takes a while to get from clients.

AND...they allowed a couple of clients to dispute charges that were from the year past, which I still don't understand.

The worst part of the dispute process is that they'll take the money from your account and then take forever to return it. In both my cases, I had to pay the premium service to be able to talk to customer service, which got me nowhere and then had to email the dispute team with additional information (which you're not supposed to do since they have a form you fill out through the portal).

And then, if you have customer who makes purchases for the same amount...you can't do instant deposit because they'll hold the funds to make sure you're not ripping people off even though you've demonstrated to be a credible and reputable business.

I love how easy it is to set up multiple ways to accept payments. The interface is user friendly, they have multiple ways to pay, an excellent invoicing system, and they deposit money in my account promptly.

I honestly haven't come across anything I don't care for. So far, it's perfectly suited my needs both as a freelancer invoicing clients and as a writer accepting payments for books.