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Comment by ypanetir | Hacker News Reader

> The first ~200k in revenue can be done manually.

What do you mean by 'done manually'? Could you elaborate for the curious? How does one handle CC transactions manually?

No idea what his business model is. That said, my b2b saas company ran our first 5 customers with old skool paper invoices and checks, doing 6/12 month pre-pay. CC processing fee's can really eat into early revenue like this even.

Sure, but does high volume low value transactions necessitate CC processors?

If I want to use CC transactions is there a 'manual' way? Can I collect the numbers and 'process' them myself?

Yes. Just get a Stripe account, and you can use a 3rd party tool / app to charge any credit card any amount of money.

Stripe + 3rd Party Tool != Manual CC Payment Processing

I'm talking about manually billing cards using a 3rd party tool that works with stripe.

Yes, you've swiped at a square powered iPad, I presume? But that's not manual payment processing.

what? stripe charges 3%. if your margins are beaten up so badly by small fees and you don't have have better things to do than bookkeeping, find another niche.

I think you'll also find that some companies don't want to go to your website and pay with Stripe (or anything). They enjoy the good ol' classic "send a check" method.

very, very few companies fit this description. So few companies want to send a check that id you're product requires it, you should be in a different niche.

Well, I would say that I'm definitely not in a small niche. And can definitely confirm that most companies pay via check and Wire/ACH. Especially in the B2B world. B2C is a bit different where the company price point is low. For example, most software tools (IntelliJ, GitHub, etc) CC is more common. But for larger services where it may be many thousands a month, your claim does not seem to be the case from my experience.

Surely it depends on the business? It takes 30 seconds to raise and email an invoice and many big businesses will only work this way. CC processing is only generally necessary for B2C.

no it isn't.

unless your invoices are so large that paying with a wire transfer is better, most companies want to pay with credit card or ach.

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