There's clear demand for paying for individual dances by credit card -- with some frequency right now, I think people show up, expect it to work, and end up with somebody selling them cash for Venmo money.
We haven't historically allowed payments for individual dances for a couple reasons:
- With the manual Squares Pay / SquaresDB sync, we really didn't want people paying same night and expecting it to sync before they arrived, and individual dance payments mostly don't make sense without that
- Credit cards tend to have a significant per transaction fee, so single-dance payments might involve a pretty high overhead percentage
However, with Squares Pay integrated into SquaresDB these days, the first objection isn't relevant now -- it's very straightforward to have a dance payment update the gate page as soon as somebody refreshes it, and hopefully if the React rewrite happens it can show up immediately.
I spent some time poking at the fees a while ago (there's some past discussion of this in #db-officers), and I think maybe it's like $.30/transaction at the high end, so with a $10 dance fee, our CC fee overhead is like 6% ($.30=3%, plus 3% for the proportional part), which seems basically fine. My inclination is to keep fees down we should set a $10 minimum CC payment amount, which people can hit by paying the top end of the sliding scale, or two bottom-end dance fees, or also paying for rounds, or whatever they want. (The specifics here probably warrant a bit more discussion.)
While we're at it, I think we should allow people to pay for multiple dances for multiple people in one go -- so somebody can say "I'll be there this week and next, and I'm going to pay for both at once". UX is a somewhat interesting question -- maybe some sort of grid of checkboxes? Maybe a multiselect? (Select2?) There's also a question of whether it should be "pick some people, pick some dances" or "pick some people, then for each person pick (possibly different) dances".
There's clear demand for paying for individual dances by credit card -- with some frequency right now, I think people show up, expect it to work, and end up with somebody selling them cash for Venmo money.
We haven't historically allowed payments for individual dances for a couple reasons:
However, with Squares Pay integrated into SquaresDB these days, the first objection isn't relevant now -- it's very straightforward to have a dance payment update the gate page as soon as somebody refreshes it, and hopefully if the React rewrite happens it can show up immediately.
I spent some time poking at the fees a while ago (there's some past discussion of this in #db-officers), and I think maybe it's like $.30/transaction at the high end, so with a $10 dance fee, our CC fee overhead is like 6% ($.30=3%, plus 3% for the proportional part), which seems basically fine. My inclination is to keep fees down we should set a $10 minimum CC payment amount, which people can hit by paying the top end of the sliding scale, or two bottom-end dance fees, or also paying for rounds, or whatever they want. (The specifics here probably warrant a bit more discussion.)
While we're at it, I think we should allow people to pay for multiple dances for multiple people in one go -- so somebody can say "I'll be there this week and next, and I'm going to pay for both at once". UX is a somewhat interesting question -- maybe some sort of grid of checkboxes? Maybe a multiselect? (Select2?) There's also a question of whether it should be "pick some people, pick some dances" or "pick some people, then for each person pick (possibly different) dances".