Mandurah developer's Charge for Stripe app to help mobile businesses

Charge for Stripe allows business owners to take credit card payments through their Android mobiles without the use of external hardware, and for a fixed fee. 

Mr Stallard said competing apps would charge a percentage fee per transaction, as well as fees from online payment gateway Stripe – which added up in the long run. 

“Providing you have a phone which can read NFC – which most phones nowadays can – you can literally just tap the card on the back of your phone or you can type the card number in manually,” he said. 

“The reason we went for a fixed fee... is when you're dealing with a lot of larger value transactions – like people who are using our app at the moment – whether they are doing $3000 bathroom renovations or $150 in jewellery sales, as a percentage it doesn't take long before you're worse off.

“There's no structural difference or infrastructure difference in providing this app whether people are using it for a $50,000 transaction or $5 transaction. I felt the fixed fee was a much fairer way of doing it.”

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Mr Stallard – who runs mobile app development company Platinum Apps – had previously had the idea for developing the payment app, but it wasn’t until his wife’s jewellery business, Lava and Stone, was looking for a better option that he started to create it. 

“She sells her jewellery on a website and she uses Stripe as the payment gateway on her website but also sells them at markets,” he said. 

“In wanting to accept credit card payments – because a lot of people don't have cash – we looked into a couple of different apps and there were a couple that seemed OK and one of them which she gave a shot.

“She used it for a while; it worked OK. It was pretty ugly and pretty limited in what it does. It literally just allows you to accept payments, and that's it.

“They then went from charging a fixed fee, to charging a percentage fee and her jewellery is quite expensive and so it significantly increased what the fees were that she was going to be paying.”

As a result, Charge for Stripe was created, offering not just a financial benefit to business owners, but also access to features including sale history, information on product refunds, records of recent customers and sales charts.

“It's interesting to see what types of businesses people are using it in,” he said.  

“I built it so it can be used across any business.

“It's completely independent of whether you're making jewellery or whether you're running a beauty salon or whatever it might be.” 

Since launching in March, the Android app has become available in multiple different currencies, in more than 120 different countries.

The iOS version is also set to be released for iPhones in coming months. 

“There are some systems which allow you to build an app once and then push it out to both Android and iOS but there are a lot of limitations in doing that and it wasn't suitable for us,” Mr Stallard said. 

“Not only because we don't have the same limitations that come with those systems which allow you to push to both but also we want the Android version to look like and Android version and we want the iOS version to look like it's built for iOS.

“So they will definitely look different; have almost all the same functionality but they will look like they were built for that specific platform.”