Accepting a Credit Card at your Garage Sale

Accepting a Credit Card at your Garage Sale

Gone are the days of cheap, used items that no one wants at garage sales. At many garage sales these days, big ticket items like big screen TVs and laptops may be more common than ugly vases and broken small appliances. In cases where you may have more expensive items to sell at your garage sale, you may want to consider accepting a credit card. Many people may want to buy your TV or laptop, but they probably don’t have $100s of dollars in their wallets.  They do, however, probably have a credit card they can use.

Accepting a credit card at your garage sale can help you from getting ripped off by a personal check or from risking not selling an item you need to sell. Moving sales, for instance, may have several large, expensive items that are in excellent shape that other people may be interested in. In these cases, it will be well worth it to start accepting credit cards at your sale.

There are several ways you can go about accepting a credit card at your garage sale. If you have a laptop with an internet connection handy, your customer can give you their credit information right then and there. Using a website like PayPal, Google Checkout or ProPay can make the transaction easy and seamless in most cases.  Millions of people have accounts with PayPal, for instance, so it would be uncommon for you to find someone who is not familiar with the process. If they are not familiar with the process, be nice and walk them through it. It will only help you in the end. Even if they do not have or wish to open an account, it can still be possible to send the money to you just by using their e-mail address.

There are fees associated with these services, usually anywhere from 2- 3%. Google and PayPal base their fees on your sales volume and ProPay uses a set fee. You may also be charged a fee per transaction, so you may want to limit what you will be accepting a credit card for. The typical fee for PayPal, for instance is about 2.9%. That means, if you sell a television set for $300 and you accept payment through PayPal, you will end up paying $8.70 to PayPal and getting $291.30 for your television set. You may also have to pay an additional amount per transaction, like 30 cents.  For most people, paying that $9 is worth it when accepting a credit card.

There are also programs you can use that allow you to scan credit cards through your smart phone, but your customers may have security concerns as there is no way to be sure their credit information is erased from your phone when the transaction is complete. They will likely be much more comfortable using PayPal or Google.  When accepting a credit card at your garage sale, make sure your customers know using websites like those mentioned are safe and secure and that you, as the seller, will have no access to their personal credit information, the website is just like the middle man, helping to facilitate the final sale.