Any players besides Google and PayPal who might be worth investigating?
This isn’t easy. Most of the easily available merchant account providers are aimed at porn sites, and their rates are appropriate to this, (they get lots of chargebacks).
We used Worldpay for tickets, but their annual renewal fee is £188 - way over the top for a small business.
It might be worth having a word with your own bank - many of them are belatedly catching up with the idea of on line payments for the masses.
We used to use ‘Nochex’ as well, though I haven’t looked at them recently - they seem to have fizzled out a bit as an ebay payment scheme - I can’t think of the last time I used them.
I do think Paypal are trying to clean up their act - they asre mainly US based and as such are ripe for a class action suit if enough people get mad enough.
In their defence, I have to point out that they are often the target of major auction + stolen card frauds, This is where crooks set up a load of auctions, ‘buy’ stuff with hijacked credit card info, then get the money out of Paypal and vanish before the system catches up with the rip off. There are sophisticated communities of ‘carders’ out there, engaged in the gathering and selling of credit card info. I think Paypal’s detection software is a bit ‘hair triggered’, and coupled with a lack of investigatory staff causes lots of problems. In their earlier days, some of the problems were alleged to be internal, but there isn’t much in the way of proof, just statements by ex staff, who possibly might have their own agenda.
On the balance, I feel far happier using PayPal for buying than selling…
I’m going to try them with one of the Limor Fried, (LadyAda) “MIDIsense” boards I built, though I night need a small code hack to compensate for the ‘finger off’ state.
I’m not as I’ve done zero programming so far, but I think that the “wiper” contact disconnects itself completely from the resistive trace when the SoftPot is released, so it looks like it would be quite easy to build a software or hardware solution. It simply has to hold the value when there’s no more contact.
Yes you just need to detect when it suddenly goes to zero and that is a release. You can interpret that however you like in firmware or software. Keep track of the cycles and set threshholds.
Just an update to anyone reading this thread from the beginning - the prices quoted at the beginning are long gone. This low price was a one-time deal.
Now the price to me is higher (due to some shenanigans on another site) and the final price to the buyer is $16.95 USD each for a 170mm softpot.
