Accepting credit cards is such a necessary part of my farmers' market and craft show business, with some events seeing a third of sales paid with plastic, that it never occurred to me *not* to accept credit cards for CSA shares. Yes, you lose a portion to the fees, but you make a sale you might not have otherwise made, or make a larger sale.

For those who are curious, I use Propay.com and recommend it heartily.

Mary Kroll

Mary,

Thanks for your thoughts here! I'm not against taking credit cards for a CSA payment, I'm just saying that is a wholly different type of sale than checking out at the grocery store or a craft show. Of course credit cards are necessary for those types of transactions, but since a CSA is different, you can be creative with how you work with credit cards.

Of course, the Member Assembler offers both options and we are agnostic about what our farmers use for checkout. Just know the costs and the benefits and make the right decision!

-Simon.

Why don't you use/recommend www.revolutionmoneyexchange.com which charges no fees.

Simon,

Thanks for posting this. Very timely and very helpful as we face the annual credit card dilemma.

The main reason we've chosen not to accept credit cards is that we prefer to keep our subscribers' dollars circulating locally. This year, we're trying not to raise our prices but it may be difficult to do if we decide to accept credit cards. Yes, it may encourage additional sales. But someone is going to eat that $15 per subscription. Personally, I'd rather we all eat fresh, locally grown food rather than unneccessary, non-local credit card fees.

My thoughts are still open on this. Not sure what we'll do yet.

I look forward to some lively dialog here to enlighten me in this decision.

-Kari

Kari,

That is a really good point about keeping dollars local, I like that.

I was just talking with a CSA farmer from Oregon this morning that told me they could have sold an extra 50 CSA shares last year if they accepted credit cards. I'm not sure what that figure is based on, but that is an interesting way to look at it too.

It seemed that she was saying people could put the CSA share on their credit card and pay it over the whole season instead of having to pay the whole thing at once via check. This makes some sense to me, but you can also offer a partial down payment and then a payment plan by check instead of having customers pay even more interest to credit card companies.

We do not have the option right now to add a "convenience fee" too a Member Assembler payment that comes through credit cards, but I think this could be a good feature to add in the future. That way, the customer makes a conscious decision about where his/her money is going -- pay with a check and pay less or pay PayPal some extra dollars to get it on a credit card.

Hmm.. it is a really interesting question! I'm sure there is no "right" answer.

-Simon.

I have one CSA client with a membership of about 250. (http://www.tangerinifarms.com). All of her customers can register online through her website, and then have the option with their registration to pay now online, or submit the application and mail in the check.

She offers customers a discount if they pay by check, and that discount just happens to be about 2.5% less than the online subscription that goes through her credit card or paypal account. After the first year, only about 30 customers use the online payment plan.

Another, much larger CSA in California, (http://www.familyfarmfresh.com), which operates 52 weeks a year, has the majority of their payments coming online. Customer's also go to the website to make periodic payments, add special orders and modify their orders, adjusting the payments through the website.

I don't have any CSA clients that don't take credit cards, but these two have set their prices anticipating the fees going to paypal.

Thanks for the insights, Bill.

I'd say about 75% give the option for customers buy their shares online through a credit card processor.

Of that 75%, only about 25% accept ONLY credit card payments, the others give the customer a choice.

I don't think I have any clients that only accept credit cards. I can't imagine that, since they surely have local friends coming by the farm to pick up their shares.

Oopps....that first link should have been http://www.tangerinisfarm.com/ Sorry about that

The fee for Google check out is 2.9% plus a 30 cent fee per transaction. So a bit higher then described above. We tell our CSA members that it is there for their convenience but that it coasts us money and we tell them how much it coasts. Some need to use it to fit in with their monthly budget needs. The CSA has certainly helped us over all with that. So why not give back. We just wish we were not giving back to Google. Out of 200 or so CSA members, maybe 50 will use the Google check out. While we are hoping for more features from the member assembler in the future, this is one that we do like. What could save us a bit more money would be the ability to use our current merchant service that we have at our farmstead. We pay better rates and they do support online sales. It would be great for that ability. However, it would be hard to insert god knows how many different merchant services we all use into the member assembler. My guess is that it would have to be done on a case by case basis. I don't know about the rest of you but I had a hard enough time setting up the assembler now. Of course my five year old has no problem, I am just saying Small Farm Central does a great job of getting this farmer on the web and I would prefer not to make it more complicated.

Beware of Google Checkout and it's opaque "hold back" rules. When a new merchant (or even an established merchant) begins receiving large payments via Google Checkout that Google, in its sole discretion, considers risky (for instance, "asking a customer to pay for something to be delivered at a future date" -- sounds like a CSA share, deosn't it?) Google will "hold back" some arbitrary percentage (20%, 10%, 5%) for an arbitrary period of time (6 months, a year, indefinitely) as a hedge against some proportion of those customers later claiming not to have received the goods they ordered. I don't know how other payment processors handle this, but it's certainly something to keep in mind, especially if you are considering Google Checkout as your processor. --Haig Evans-Kavaldjian (hek@theeks.net)

We had a discussion recently about what to do with CC processing for our multi-farm CSA. Because we offer rolling membership throughout the season, we find that CC processing is easier to manage; we can invoice people online and get payment right away.

In the past, we've told people that if they want to pay that way, we'll pass along the online fee. That has worked, but we think that people may be discouraged by seeing it.

So this spring we're going to try incorporating the 3% cost into our CSA cost as overhead. If people end up sending us checks, we save 3%. If they pay online, we get the money sooner.