Anyone use Square or a competitor for small business?

By small I'm talking less than $30k/year in sales. 

Have you used Square or any competitors? Which competitors?

Positive or negative experiences?

The flat 2.75% per transaction fee sounds just ok, but the ease of use and ability to take cards and non contact payments instead of cash only sounds like a good idea. I am concerned that with lots of small transactions, $6-25 range, the fee could add up quickly. 

Long story short, I've been building an idea for several years, and am now in the hammering out the details stage. While I think cash only would be fine, I understand a lot of people don't carry cash anymore, and I'd hate to lose potential customers, but it doesn't make financial sense at all to go with a full POS system and all the fun of dealing with card companies. Even a cheap POS system would quadruple the initial investment cost, while $50 buys the square reader that handles swipe and chip cards, as well as Google/Apple/Samsung pay.

We use Square here at GRM. It's slick, works at events on wifi or cell, people are familiar with the interface, and the fees are similar to other merchant processors. Credit card payments are a necessary evil; at least Square makes them fairly simple.

Margie

Square is super easy. 

I run finances for a non-profit that does maybe $10k in in-person sales/year and $200k online. We use Stripe for payment processing and Clover (1st data) to take swipes. If we were going to go with in-person sales I would use Square, but Stripe (1) gives us a non-profit discount for online payments and (2) is super amazingly powerful and staffed with super helpful people.

We used to use PayPal. Stay away from them! Terrible, terrible customer service.

I'm on my kid's elementary school PTA board, and we bought PayPal's card swipers out of inertia (we had an existing PayPal merchant account).  It has been a total game changer for us for events that we have at school.  Where we used to get a lot of "Oh, I don't have cash on me, I'll do the PTA membership thing at home", now that we can take the payments on site it makes people much more likely to pull the trigger right away. We also sell t-shirts, etc. - and at our first school event we did over $1000 in sales that we didn't do the year before.  

A recommendation from Margie seals that up then.

Dave, thank you for those leads as well. The first year will be in person food sales exclusively, but if a demand develops for merchandise I will probably branch into online sales for the second year on out. 

I'm writing up 3 year projection, so it probably would be a good idea to include some variables related to online sales. 

Square is perfect for what you’re describing. The biggest problem with regular merchant services (POS type setup) is the monthly minimums. I used to have sales people knocking on my door wanting to undercut PayPals rates but they always glossed over the fact that their monthly minimums would cost me more than my PayPal fees in total. I want to say they’re usually around $50+ but that was 15 years ago...

Our small, non-profit car club has been using Square for a few years now. We move well under $30k a year (probably $10k or so) but it seems to be working flawlessly.  We use it for on-site autocross, drift, and rally registrations. 

Yeah, it costs us a little money, but that’s more than made up by the extra revenue and convenience factor. 

We use both Paypal swiper, and square. 

SCR-SCCA uses Square for credit card payments at event registration.

My wife uses Square for her business. 

I use Quickbooks merchant services. 

Nobody has had any problems with Square withholding deposits or shutting down accounts for no reason? 

Those are the 2 biggest negative reviews I've read so far, combined with customer service that makes Comcast sound pleasant to deal with. But we all know how internet reviews can be. 

My wife hasn't mentioned anything about that and I'm pretty sure she would hit the roof if they did. 

I don't recall seeing any minimums, but that would be something you wanna check.. but I've been using Swipe Simple though my card processor. Cost me a grand total of nuthin up front and bluetooths to a phone easily and is cheaper to run than Square by, well, a lot. 

Pay Anywhere was better than Square so we switched.

Fewer errors when trying to connect and less cost.  Win/win