My iZettle has arrived!

June 22nd, 2012

I got a fantastic surprise in the post today. I thought it would take weeks to get here, but only after a few days of registering on the website, my iZettle card reader has arrived!

For those of you who are not following me on Facebook (why not?), iZettle are a company that produce a small card reader that plugs into your iPhone or iPad and enables you to take credit card payments via an app.

I’ve always wanted to be able to take credit card payments and feel I’ve lost out on a lot of sales as I don’t accept card payments when I do craft fairs and events, but I never wanted to go to the expense of sorting out a merchant account and hiring a card reader and having to pay monthly for something I would only use a few times a year.

Since I got my iPhone recently to replace the ancient phone I’d had for decades I’ve been on the lookout for an app or device that would let me use my iPhone as a card reader.

My search led me to the US firm Square who had just what I wanted – something I could simply plug into my iPhone and swipe a card through. Unfortunately after a few emails back and forth I was told that they were unlikely to be rolling the device out in the UK anytime soon.

So I carried on looking and eventually came across iZettle – this is a Scandinavian company with a similar device. Currently only available in the Nordics, more searching took me to several articles about them wanting to introduce the device to the UK.

Brilliant. They were looking for 3000 beta testers in the UK, so I signed up on the site and requested an invite. Within a few days my request had been accepted and I was told that an iZettle device was on its way to me. And here it is…

It’s so dinky – it’s slides into the iPhone socket and you then install and open the iZettle App. From here you can type in the amount of money you want someone to pay, take a photo of what they’re buying and add a description of the item. They then put their card into the reader and click on the pay button, sign on the screen, and if they want a receipt, they can enter their email address and one will be emailed to them.

At the moment they don’t accept Visa card, but do Mastercard, America Express and Diners Club. I was a bit worried about this as I thought Visa was the most popular choice in credit cards, but after a quick question on Facebook, most people responded that they used Mastercard.

Here’s a funky video about using the iZettle card reader.

I’m so excited about using it – going to do a trial run at my Open Studios event in August – well I hope I have some sales and get a chance to use it!

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