Processor on the Fly

The last day of the convention was, surprisingly, the busiest for me. So much so I had to turn away people. Which sounds good, but kind of sucked.

Early in the day a couple approached me for some tattoos. One was paying cash and the other wanted to pay with a credit card.

The last thing on my mind was having a credit card processor.

But I really wanted to fix his tattoo. I've spent some quality time in San Diego and wanted to spruce up his letters... you know, do it justice.

Instantly I thought of the iPhone application, Credit Card Terminal. You have to have an account with Authorize.Net and it seems like a great idea. But I didn't have time to setup an account with them and the iPhone reception in the Hyatt was spotty.

The mental trail led me to where I did have an account: Paypal. I told the couple it would be about fifteen minutes and I hit up the business center computers with Paypal in mind.

Paypal has a simple setup to add payment options to a business account. It didn't matter how it looked, there wasn't really time for that. I just needed my customer to be able to pay. So I setup a new default blog in Movable Type (allentattoo.com/payment) and then pasted in the Paypal code. Ten minutes later, he was sitting there typing in his information. Twelve minutes later I had money in my account.

A little over an hour later, and the tattoo was complete.