PayPal Enterprise Payments, formerly Braintree, is a billing platform which stores credit card data directly from the merchant’s systems on secure servers, and it allows for cards to be recharged or refunded. It also supports international payments.
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Square POS
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android, and iPad along with the flexibility to accept credit card payments anywhere, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Braintree is a lower cost alternative to many of the options business owners have through their bank. However, they will need to be techy or be working with a developer to set up. The setup and backend isn't as user friendly as alternatives. Braintree is a great option if you'll need to manually type in credit card details. Banks will sometimes charge a lot more for that option. The manual option is nice if your clients aren't as tech savvy and prefer to pay over the phone than to pay on your website.
Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.
Braintree has excellent integration with the BigCommerce platform. The switch of our previous payment processing gateway to Braintree was very easy and only required a few clicks.
Tying into Braintree's BigCommerce integration, for company's like ours that are on the BigCommerce enterprise plan, Braintree's rates for BigCommerce enterprise customers are extremely competitive and saved us money.
Braintree has a pretty easy to use portal that can be accessed through the same login we use for PayPal which we are using in conjunction with Braintree with ease.
I've only had to call Braintree twice and my customer service issues were handled extremely quickly and easily.
Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly).
Simple setup.
Generally uncomplicated pricing.
Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider.
I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
As a product, functionality has been fine for us. In our experience, some issues during On Boarding but because we had a dedicated Account Manager assigned to us, these issues were dealt with. Now we are a customer, it feels like they have stopped caring about us or aren't interested in working with us to resolve any issues we have.
We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login
Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.
An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.
Braintree is better at handling international payments and supporting a variety of payment methods that can all be configured from the same dashboard. Braintree supports PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. in addition to simply credit cards like Stripe. Braintree has a vault of existing user payment methods so the user doesn't have to re-enter their information each time.
We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with Authorize.Net. It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.
The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month.
We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals.
Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space.
