This is absolutely killing me (https://quailhq.com) -- I've got hundreds of antique stores trying to get us on the phone, all wanting to know why their card readers have suddenly stopped working.
It's going to be a long, long day.
It's going to be a long, long day.
In any case, I built all the software to talk to an in-house, isolated Payments API that I wrote, so that every part of our code that processes payments sends requests to our API, which handles all the back-and-forth with Square and distills the results. If it were necessary, I'd just change that API to talk to some other processor. But that wouldn't be a one-day job. As it is, it would take days or weeks to even arrange a banking relationship between the company and a different processor. I've argued for a backup to be built to a second processor, but the company hasn't wanted to deal with the cost or the hassle. They would also then need to have two separate terminals at each checkout register, and we would need to store customer cards on file with two separate processors.
Even so, perhaps this week's events will change their mind.
But I'm curious what you think would be a "more robust" option, for API access + physical terminal, since aren't all merchant processors prone to the same potential issues?
Do you receive a commision from Square as compensation to build on their platform?