Annoyed at having to pay a big fee whenever a
customer uses their card? Eating away at your profits, these
charges can be a frustrating overhead. A new service from
three Oxford graduates called Paylinks by GoCardless aims
to change all that.
Co-founded by Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson,
GoCardless is aiming to be the Bit.ly of payments. The London based
company launched in January 2011 and was bootstrapped before being
accepted into the Y-Combinator programme. The team then had a first
seed round at the end of the year raising $1.5m in funding. They
launched their BETA (first version) in September and the business
has grown 50% every month since then.
Paylinks lets you accept a payment from customers for only a 1%
charge, and a maximum charge of £2, all without you having to buy a
card reader or set up a merchant account.
"We make it really cheap and easy for merchants to collect money
from their customers," says Robinson. "Currently, businesses have
to pay a 3-4% charge to accept a card and it can take ages to get
set up with a merchant account. With GoCardless you can create an
account in 60 seconds and start collecting money."
Putting this into perspective, Robinson adds, "If you're a small
business and your company collects £1,000, then you would usually
pay £30 in charges. At GoCardless we never charge more than £2 and
only 1% for anything under that."
Paylinks by GoCardless can do this because it creates a
shortened, tweet friendly link that uses information of the
customer's bank, rather than their card details. As the payment
comes in link form, it cuts out the need for a business to have a
card reader or merchant account.
You can embed the link into your website making it instantly
e-commerce, or you can send the link to customers and even friends
who owe you money.
"One of our customers is a window cleaner who has to collect
payments of maximum £20 from his customers. We set him up with
GoCardless and now he just sends the link round to his clients and
collects his money that way. It's easier for him to do that than go
round knocking on doors."
So hopefully with less door knocking and money chasing to do,
small businesses will be able to concentrate on finding new
customers instead of waiting for their old ones to pay them.
For more information about GoCardless click here.