How to Accept Credit Cards in Your Small Business as a Unicorn
Merchant account. Payment gateway. PCI compliance. Virtual terminal. Error message, again…. A million different passwords to remember and and hundreds of hoops to jump through, and all you wanna do is chill today meditating with the unicorns and fairies in your garden! What is a High-Healed Priestess (HHP) hippie-chick gonna do in her BLI$$ness when she absolutely must accept credit cards to make the big love buck$, yet the process of accepting them makes her tremble in her heels as she walks this uphill masculine road in the world of banks n’ business?
Today I navigated through some murky uncharted territories in banking and ecommerce; I wanted to share the process with you so that you can feel empowered to add credit card processing to your BLI$$ness, and you’ll be prepared to do so HHP style…. High-Healed Priestess big girls’ panties on – unicorn-riding ladies, read on!
I wanted to hurl when I dealt with my money (or lack thereof) as a 4-figure hippie-healer chick in my 20s.
I’m a heart-based healer, a spiritual coach, Divine Feminine Lightworker, energy practitioner, unicorn rider, and shaman by nature… I am a High-Healed Priestess, not a business woman, so I decided to come up with the term BLI$$preneur for myself and other luscious ladies who dig turning their BLI$$ into 6-Figure BLI$$nesses. A few years ago, the thought of accepting credit cards for my holistic spa business would’ve made me want to vomit. Now that I am much stronger and have done lots of healing on my Feminine and Masculine, I am open to the Divine Masculine and I receive as a High-Healed Priestess, energetically and financially. So I have been accepting payments on PayPal’s credit card systems for around a year, but PayPal fees are high unless someone gives you their physical card to swipe. Experts had told me it was time to switch from PayPal to accepting credit cards, because my business had grown quickly and I had high dollar-amount transactions. So about three months ago, I switched to using 1shoppingcart.com, authorize.net, and a merchant account with a gateway set up through my bank. Getting these systems in place took a lot of steps over the course of about a month; it was a big scary step for me in my pink heels! Yet since doing so, I now have automatic billing, and I am insured that my clients’ cards are being swiped (before I would occasionally forget, whoops!).
Steppin’ out as a HHP ain’t always comfortable.
My next big step
Last week, Kay Koh, my amazing bookkeeper, was like “Amanda, your credit card fees look insanely high!” Let me first say that when I was an ungrounded hippie-healer chick, I would have hated having a bookkeeper because the thought of looking at and keeping track of money frightened me. I would feel death shuddering through my body when taxes came up and do anything to avoid paying them – probably why I only earned 4-figures throughout my twenties! So this time around, as a more enlightened HHP, I knew I had to deal with the situation. Yech…
“Can’t we live in a world where we’re all one and don’t have to deal with money?” was my first thought. My second thought in response to that was, “Yes, just not today! You gotta deal with this $h*t and shift it in order to restore the wealth consciousness for the Divine Feminine.” Darnit! Stupid spirit guides channeling through me with the truth…
During my credit card escapade today, I was assisted on the phone by four different male and two female support employees at my merchant account, Authorize.net, and PayPal centers, and also via email a few times with my bank. It was head-spinning and I started to go into melt-down-mode at my desk. I hate that! There were all these little steps to take, being put on hold, getting passed to the next agent, and teensy tangles to sort out… In my past, I’d wanna run away and go back to being a hippie-healer chick stuck in her upper chakras, spiritual, woo-woo, and in a world only accessible to me and the unicorns (I still go there often, trust me, but now it’s more intentional than a fear-escape).
When I spoke with an account expert at First Data, my merchant account peeps, he explained some startling news about my transaction fees. While I had been told I’d be paying just 2.1% for each transaction, I was actually paying 3.5%. Why have I been paying a whopping 3.5% for my credit card transaction fees? This isn’t even including what I pay annually for 1shoppingcart.com (around $700/year), which is crazy, and it’s even higher than PayPal’s Transaction fees!
How I dealt with the drama
This little guy did it, why can’t we?
Suddenly, it hit me like a bolt of Divine wisdom! I became like a unicorn with a golden corn, letting that stress dance below me. Newsflash: my money and credit cards aren’t me, they’re just a game I play in the Divine game of life. I started smiling and laughing… I so think laughter is a spiritual key of doing BLI$$ness! We can get so serious about money and numbers until it turns us blue in the face and kills us…so un-HPP!
I noticed myself stop breathing, so I breathed. My posture was hideous, so I sat up straight. I asked the guys if there was a way to lower my ridiculous merchant fees, and it turns out there was a simple solution! We looked into it, and because I have international clients and some American clients who have unusual types of credit cards, my fees were not being approved for the 2.15% rate I was being promised. So the guy, who seemed like a real sweetie, offered me a program called Interchange Plus which had rates that would fit me best, dropping my average transaction fees to a flat 1.9%. Also, he apologized for the inconvenience of my super-high rates, and gave me a $100 refund, so mama can go buy a nice dinner in her new big girl bejeweled HHP panties!
Also, I imagined that the women were supporting me from a “you can do it sister!” vibe, and that the men were thinking “of course I want to support you, you are a High-Healed Priestess and we men like to serve!” which made it kinda fun. Years past I would have thought “they want to behead me or burn me at the stake for owning my pleasures and power,” but today felt relatively easy! Funny how when we see the world differently, our world changes. I dunno about you, but I choose to see BLI$$ everywhere!
Pampurr yourself!
It wasn’t BLI$$ful doing these actions today, so I am going to reward myself with a few treats (a new Canon SLR camera, green juice, and a beach walk!). I’m also going to cut back on the things I was planning to do this afternoon because, let’s face it, you can’t do too many stressful things in a day without getting a bad complexion, and that’s not good for BLI$$ness!
Don’t forget to create your reality in your BLI$$ness – knock off those old unblissful victim patterns and just allow even the most mundane or difficult things be part of your HHP adventure! Then, make sure you pamper yourself up the wazoo with some glorious things like baths, healthy foods, exercise, treats, tango lessons, whatever you want! Drink lots of water if you’ve just stressed, it’ll make you feel like a new woman. Finally, this may sound a little unicorny, but you are a queen now, so take that throne seriously sister, and FEMpower yourself by not wavering in your goals, bliss, and spiritual connection!
Aho, namaste.
Amandicorn
