[TheForge] credit card accounts

[theforge@mailman.qth.net]

For about the first dozen years of selling books, it's safe to say 
that I had received less than 5 charges for books that I was never 
able to collect on.  In the last ten years, I've had way too many 
charges that I was never able to collect on.  

When I go to a conference to sell books, I take charge slips with 
me and swipe them the old fashioned way.  Then when I get home I 
enter all charges into my PC through a program called ICVERIFY 
(www.icverify.com)and the charges are submitted for collection.  If 
a charge bounces, it's easy to find the "swiped" slip and then try to 
find the person who made the charge.  If the person was registered 
at the conference, locating them is not a problem.  On all the 
charges I've not been able to collect on the person was either not 
registered at the conference or someone used a card that was not 
theirs.  In either case there is no way to find the person.  

I've been thinking of asking people for an identification of some sort 
to at least see that the credit card has their name on it.  At a 
typical conference I'd say sales are about 80% credit card and 
20% cash.  

I'd have to check but I think I pay a flat fee of about 2.6% of the 
charges submitted.  For sure the more dollar volume one does, the 
lower the fee.  The dollar average per charge also figures into the 
percentage fee.

Most of my book sales are people calling, writing, faxing, or 
emailing in and making charge purchases and these are never a 
major problem.  

The dollar costs of taking credit cards is surely something should 
be held to an absolute minimum--just like any other expense.  I'm 
open to any suggestions that anyone may have.

Norm Larson