Hello everyone,

I have recently joined this forum and am in the process of embarking on two schemes, interlinked. (whilst doing my day job, as one does).

One - is hand painted murals for kiddies bedrooms. I have some experience in this in South African, but have been in the UK for nearly 7 years now and keen to get back into that

and the 2nd is craft fairs - where I plan to sell hand crafted mosaics and paintings, as well as using this as a forum for promoting my name and hopefully obtaining commisions.

My query regards taking CC payments. I've found a couple of threads on this forum giving some useful information, however at this stage I need a kind of a quick temp fix to this problem. I've 'ordered' a business account which should be set up before the end of September, when my first craft show takes place. It seems I need that to get a merchant number and to get a system for taking credit card payments.

I was hoping to hire a terminal as I wouldnt need one very regularly, this seems to be expensive and it is unlikely I'd get it sorted by the end of the month (September). Is there any way I can do a sort of laptop + bluetooth to phone (for internet access) set up, as a temp measure to deal with cc transactions? Without knowing how many CC sales I would do, and how much turnover I;ll be doing, I dont really want to commit to the expense of a permanent mobile cc transaction machine. The banks dont seem to allow those old fashioned swipe machines unless you get it as a backup.

Any ideas or suggestions would be most welcome.

Many thanks,

Maureen
morriine@yahoo.com
www.sparkle-empire.co.uk (website not yet finished!)