In a surprising move, Square card reader updated their terms of service agreement that every user must agree to before processing to include the ban of all sales of firearms, firearm hardware, and ammunition. Previously, the agreement had only excluded sales of guns and other weapons from online, mail order, and telephone sales outlets.
The move comes at a time when many brick and mortar gun stores and gun show vendors are doing more business than ever. This increase in volume is mainly due to recent legislation on the state and federal level to limit consumers’ access to certain types of weapons and ammunition. This fear of the unknown for the future has fueled a run on shops that are struggling to keep inventory on their shelves.
Some other notable businesses that ban weapon sales are eBay, a popular online –auction site, and PayPal. This leaves many reputable merchants with a question mark of who they can process their legitimate transactions with in a time when their business is experiencing exponential growth. The finance arm of General Electric will also no longer provide funding to gun retailers.
Accept mobile payments
For those vendors that do business through gun shows and need a mobile processor for their smartphone or tablet, we offer a great alternative to Square. HMS has a number of mobile payment processing solutions that work with both iPhone and iPad as well as Android smartphones and tablets. For those merchants that have brick and mortar locations we can provide our lowest interchange plus pricing along with our wide variety of terminals and integrations into existing POS systems.
Gun show vendors usually require a mobile payment processing solution
At the end of the day this change to Square’s policy leaves many gun sellers without a means to accept credit cards in a time when business is booming. HMS is a great solution not only because we have many clients that are gun vendors but also because we can provide an affordable rate to maximize the profit from that next sale. I’ll finish with one last intriguing question: what is the best way to recycle all those obsolete little squares…?
