Best in show hardware: Credit card swiper for PayPal

July 1, 2008

I visited a lot of stands at eBay Live! this year but USBSwiper.com definately won my vote for the best new hardware product of interest to eBay sellers.

The USBSwiper does exactly what it sounds like, it enables you to swipe a credit card in a USB dongle and deposits money into your PayPal account. It works with both PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal PayFlow Pro so functions equally well in the UK and the US.

Rather than typing the details of cards into the virtual terminal it enables the card information to be read by the USBSwiper in the same manner as every cash register up and down the country prior to the introduction of chip and pin.

If, as a seller, you visit tradeshows and want to accept credit cards on the spot for customer orders all you need is your laptop, a WiFi or mobile internet connection and the USBSwiper. In addition it avoids the need for a separate merchant account for accepting credit cards, which is a boon for the small business as the only cost to process the funds are the PayPal charges.

There’s a set up cost of $49.97 (~£25.00) for the hardware and $197.00 (~£100.00) for the software license. From then on the solution costs just $4.95/mth (~£2.50) making ongoing costs negligible.

This really is one of the products sellers have been begging for for years and definitely a point of sale tool that businesses operating primarily online should consider for offline transactions.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Featured, Paypal | 18 Comments