{Day 11} 31 Days of Craft Show Preparation – Earning the Money

Buffer

Tweet

Money is one of the reasons you are doing the craft show right? Do you know how you’ll accept payments?

Molly (the originator of this series) shares her thoughts on accepting payments. She refers to her mom who has done a number of shows. She accepts cash, check and credit. Her mom has actually only experienced 1 bad check in her whole craft show career. That is a pretty good average.

I used to work in the check processing department of a large grocery chain and we had some pretty good fakes. These were checks, money orders and travelers checks. It can be a lot of work to investigate, report and cover yourself if processing these on your own.

The Future of Payments – The Square

Do you have a Square? These are little attachments you can add to your iPad or Smart phone to accept payments. I first saw one from a local friend and was immediately interested but then my caution side popped in with  ’This is super dangerous‘. What if you lose it? What if it’s stolen?

Do customers sign information releases because now you store their info on your phone? I could be wrong about that last thing but where does their information get stored? The cloud? How is it protected?

Paypal now has a payment reader. It is definitely the future but I would be 100% sure about liability and protection of customers information. You also want to consider your protection too because you might get a customer who tries to pay with a stolen card.

Yes, there are safety guards put in place by the card companies but I would double check before using them. Make sure you and your customer are safe.

Funny Money

My little experience at craft shows has only been cash. I make sure to have plenty of ones, change, and 5′s and 10′s. I don’t deal with large bills. Yes, I know counterfeit bills can be done in smaller increments but a loss on $5 or $20 is better than a loss on a higher amount.

Why do I mention this? Will it happen to you? I’m thinking NO however I do want to mention it because it does happen. People are so good at it that many big businesses and even banks have been fooled. (see article by Huffington Post featuring TD Bank and Bill Hagman)

Back in high school I took a banking course and one of the exercises we had to do was go through piles and piles of bills to catch the counterfeit. The point of the lesson was to be so familiar with the real deal that you would be able to spot a fake quickly. Can you spot a fake? Do you know what to do if one passes through to you? (reporting counterfeit money)

 How do you handle receiving payments during craft shows? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Join me in the 31 Days of Craft Show Preparation by Blogger Molly of http://mollyeleen.wordpress.com. Molly was inspired to do the 31 days challenge when her friends took on the challenge that The Nester hosts each year. (based on the 31 Days to build a better blog by ProBlogger)

 How You Can Participate

1. Visit Molly’s Blog post which has all 31 posts in the series
2. Blog about it. You can do one post for the entire week or one post per day. I’ll be doing one post a day. (31)
3. Chat about it either on the Crochet Business fanpage or in either the CBB Google+ community or CBB Fb group.