Iphone app turns phone into credit card terminal | Hacker News Reader

Iphone app turns phone into credit card terminal

techflash.com

30 pointsrokhayakebe22 comments

It's a $45 app that saves time. You guys are thinking like developers; instead think like someone a craft fair selling jewelry. Instead of surfing to a web page and going through the steps while you have a bunch of prospective customers to deal with, you just enter the CC info (I think getting the buyer to sign via touch screen is excellent and may be used to lower your fees) and the software does the rest.

The $45 buys you the difference between a 2 minute operation and a 20 second operation and for the target market it's probably worth it.

I disagree about the time. It looks like the data entry portion of the transaction is already approaching 2 minutes, especially if the person offering the credit card wants a receipt and has to spell out their e-mail address.

Now here is where that EverNote + Eye-Fi app is a better solution.

Take a picture of user's credit card or even consumer holding their credit card and have the app record/semantically understand the info and charge consumer accordingly. No data entry needed!

Taking a pic of the purchaser holding their CC would be good for fraud purposes and possibly social shopping (that might be a stretch though).

The better solution is whatever the credit card processor wants. If that's a signature because their pricing/risk model offers lower rates if you have the customer's signature, then taking a picture of the customer won't do any good other than making you feel better.

Besides, I'm willing to bet that the error rate of image processing on the card vs. having the operator type in CC# is an order of magnitude higher. We aren't talking controlled lighting conditions here: it's a busy operator taking a pic of a worn credit card at varying angles, with possible shadows, reflections, etc. I've done manual CC and check transactions in a retail environment: with just a little practice you get very fast at it.

It's too bad the iPhone's camera is too crappy to do barcode reading. You could make the iPhone a full blown Point of Sale device. Snap pictures of the barcode, and your item gets rung up.

Of course, for really small vendors, a drop-down list of your items is probably better.

That's easily solved with a portable wireless printer:

http://www.provantage.com/oneil-200070-001~7ONEP009.htm

Here's one with a card swiper built in as well:

http://www.aircharge.com/ourProducts/airCharge/airBlue.asp

Any employee in my office could use this app to quickly sell merchandise and products on a convention showfloor.

It may not be free and similar services may be offered elsewhere, but this still looks very quick and friendly.

People here have suggested leaving paypal or authorize.net open on their iPhone, which I can only assume means "in a Mobile Safari window," which, in reality, means "you will be re-loading the full page multiple times over your Edge connection every time you wish to make a transaction." That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion.

This app may not be perfect, and doesn't seem particularly tuned to hackers (based on the response here), but it seems like a fairly simple front-end you could distribute to a small team at a trade show, convention, or fair, and not really have to think twice about it beyond that, which is a huge plus.

"That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion."

I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this too for convention sales. If you've already got an online checkout form, why not just update it to detect the iPhone and render using an appropriate stylesheet?

If you have to mix two billing/merchant systems (because you have to use authorize.net for this), that's even more inefficient, IMO.

I was almost entirely referring to mobile Safari's tendency to cache nothing ever. With an app like this, everything but the actual transaction data is stored locally, and the time you'd save from that could easily be the difference between accepting credit cards being worth it, or a too much of a hassle. Both in terms of potential consistency and responsiveness (no screen zooming in and out to enter data in a form field, for instance), and speed (no having to worry about having to wait between states other than actual card processing), having this software running locally as a native app instead of an optimized site, I think, have very tangible benefits given where this app would most likely be used.

Man, wrote more than I meant to there. Whoops!

It's truly a bummer that 3rd parties can't access the dock connector for data xfer. A card swiper would work great attached to the bottom of the phone.

There are already bluetooth card swipers and printers designed for use with smartphones:

http://www.aircharge.com/ourProducts/airCharge/airBlue.asp

Plenty of people have written payment processor interfaces in the web space; this product isn't going to sustain the $45 price point, because it isn't defensible.

It's a great idea, though.

I agree completely. It may be inconvenient to navigate to a web page to input this information, but that's a problem that can be solved by writing an app for less than $45. I don't even know Objective-C, but I bet I could do it in a few hours.

For bonus points, there could be a generic "web form" application that scrapes web forms and allows easy POST access to them with a native GUI.

I almost want to do this, but I don't have Apple's permission. Too bad.

I would imagine that someone could also sign up for PayPal's merchant processing account and just use the virtual terminal in the iPhone browser.

PayPal also typically approves small merchants for much higher limits than authorize.net resellers.

What would be cool is if you could capture the buyer's signature via the touch screen and snap a digital photo of the back of the card and have it store that stuff somewhere along with the transaction ID.

There is at least one app on the PalmOS (Treo, etc) that captures a user's signature on the touch screen via the stylus, so I was surprised the author of the article believes this is a new concept. However, actually creating and submitting an app is always a good concept.

Authorize.net lets you do this from their website already... It would only be cool in tandem with an accessory credit card reader.

Speaking of, I hope Apple has/will have a good way to add and control accessories. The iPhone/iPod touch makes a good interface for almost anything. Anyone know if the API supports this type of thing?

http://developer.apple.com/ipod/accessories.html

In short, no, there is not a quick and official "good way" to add accessories to the dock interface.

If you email them, you get back a response starting wtih: "Any accessory that utilizes Apple IP is required to be licensed through the Made for iPod program." Attached to the email is a zip file containing a read-only word document.

The word document tells you to enter contacts for legal, marketing, and engineering. You must have at least two different people as contacts.

You can probably jailbreak your phone to access custom made accessories: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

I think the flexibility and portability is interesting. It could be a neat universal remote. I could program the "remote" to have a back button like a browser, instead of last channel. Also, program suggestions, rotten tomatoes ratings, imdb info, etc.

(Am I the only one who thinks the iPhone is actually a terrible interface for typing? Think about typing your password, now imagine you do it on an iPhone (so no benefit from autocorrection). I fat finger all the time, and I don't even have fat fingers! :(

Its good for scrolling and gestural input, but a very poor data-entry platform.

I'm confused, couldn't you do this with iPhone's browser and have paypal open? Or probably go to Authorize.net's website?

Seems like what Apple uses in their retail stores minus the iPhone.

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