If you’re not familiar with Etsy, it’s an online website where people can go to sell all kinds of crafts, handmade goods and other products that were… well hand made in some way or another. It’s actually become pretty successful over the years and has allowed many individuals a way to sell their wares. You can find pretty much anything on Etsy, from handmade leather notebooks, to soaps, to jewelery, and everything in between. If you can think of it, you can probably find it on Etsy. Up until now though there hasn’t been a really good way for Etsy sellers to interact with their buyers in the real world, but that all changes today.
Etsy has just unveiled that they’re launching a card reader device that can be plugged into your Android smartphone that allows sellers to take credit card payments from buyers, much in the way that Square does for local businesses. There is one catch, if you can consider it a catch, which is that sellers must use the “Sell on Etsy” mobile app to take payments using the card reader. Through the app and in pairing with card reader, sellers can sell goods that aren’t even listed yet and take payments, something that might be particularly useful at town markets and such. The Portland Saturday Market here in Portland, Oregon for instance would be a great environment for the Etsy card reader to thrive in.
The card reader plus app reportedly only supports U.S. based sellers at the moment, but Etsy has plans to expand the card reader to other locations in due time. The good news is that sellers who make transactions in person have no Etsy transaction fee like they do when selling through the website. However there is a card swipe fee of 2.75 per cent per swipe, more if you end up having to manually enter the card number information, coming to an amount of 3 per cent plus $0.25. All major credit cards are accepted through the card reader so it seems that no one will really be left out when it comes to compatibility. As payments aren’t made through the Etsy website for in-person sales with the card reader, one would think that the money paid for goods wouldn’t be in line with the rest of the funds on a sellers shop account, but Etsy states that the card reader funnels those funds in with the rest, which should be good news for sellers.