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Ask HN: Is there a service like Stripe but for physical credit cards?

2 points| edub | 11 years ago

I'm interested in writing a custom POS for our business, but I've no interest in dealing with the hardware (like a phone dongle to swipe cards) or with dealing with a Merchant bank. Ideally it would be a company that provides the hardware to swipe a card (that would be compatible with tablets and smart phones), an easy to work with API, and handles settling the money to my bank account. I like how Square doesn't deal with the 30 cents per swipe, that it is just a flat 2.75% regardless, but that's because I have a lot of smaller transactions. They are all face to face transactions, so I want the lower merchant rate. Otherwise I could probably just use Stripe (didn't check ToS) but that's more expensive than Square, and Square's POS doesn't work well enough with our process.

Does anyone know if there is a provider that does this?

5 comments

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[+] YoAdrian|11 years ago|reply
You want hardware to swipe a card, that's compatible with tablets and smart phones, but isn't a dongle (https://squareup.com/reader)? Or, I suppose, their POS stand (https://squareup.com/stand)?

Do you just not want to use their software? You want to use the hardware with your own app on a tablet or phone?

[+] aquark|11 years ago|reply
If you want to hook it up to a device with a USB port then there are any number of USB card swipers that will easily reader the card details and you could then integrate with Stripe.

For a mobile solution something like https://cardflight.com/ would be an option which works with a number of backends

[+] edub|11 years ago|reply
Thank you, that looks almost exactly like what I was looking for. I wish they took care of the merchant services as well like Square, but at least they work with enough processors that I'm sure at least one of them will be a good match for me.
[+] edub|11 years ago|reply
That's correct, I want to use someone elses hardware with software I want to write. I guess basically I'm looking for someone that is just like square except instead of them writing the POS interface they were like Stripe where they provide the API and not the UI.