Remember in this post when I said we could accept credit cards in our booth at market? Well, we thought we could. Jeff researched and we got a great deal on a little Tablet and it said that the cube worked with it (what is attached to slide cards.) However, when we got to market we realized some problems. For one we didn’t get internet connection. Apparently the Wi-Fi is spotty in that area and we couldn’t get it to work. Bummer. (Double bummer when people had read the post and came by that day wanting to purchase some items from our booth with their credit card.) Also, the cube didn’t work with that particular pad even though they said it would when we bought it. (And it needed something called “encryption” to take credit cards, that it didn’t have.) We could have returned it I guess (if that would have even been an option?), but Jeff had already downloaded music on it and was really enjoying listening to music while he was working at his loud sanding machine for long periods of time. He started using it whenever he worked and he loved it. (He had already gotten attached to it.) So we kept it. But we still wanted to figure out how to be able to take credit cards in our booth. We saved up for awhile. Jeff researched more. iPads were way out of our price range, but we found a nice sized Samsung Tablet for a really good deal and bought a device to go along with it that increases our internet connection (not remembering what it’s called.) It requires a monthly payment, which we felt hesitant about, but we felt it would pay for itself so we went for it. Actually it was Jeff who had a strong feeling about all this. I’m pretty clueless when it comes to technology for the most part. I thought it would be great to be able to take credit cards in our booth, but I didn’t know how to make that happen affordably. I trusted Jeff’s strong feeling about the whole thing, that it would be a really good investment for our business. He got our new Tablet all set up and on Saturday we tried it out for the first time. It worked!! We were so excited. We immediately put up a sign at the front of our booth to let people know. In a single day we had five people pay with a credit card in our booth. It was so quick and easy to use, it took mere seconds to complete the transaction. People told us they wouldn’t have bought anything unless they saw our sign, because they didn’t have any cash with them. People carry less cash these days. We knew we needed to “get with the times.” After one day, our new Tablet (and monthly fee) is already paying for itself. Yippee! We’re so so glad about our decision already.
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