If you’ve ever gone into the Apple Store (who hasn’t?), you’ve seen that many of the employees have mobile checkout capability. Using a Windows Mobile based system, the Apple Store employee can charge your credit card and even email the receipt to you. I surmised that Apple has been forced to use the Windows Mobile based system because at the time they didn’t have a portable device to do the transactions. With the iPhone / iPod Touch, those days may be over. Enter iSwipe Credit Card Terminal
AppNinja’s iSwipe for iPhone may just be a glimpse into Apple Store retail future. iSwipe allows anyone with a Authorize.net, Cybersource or PayPal Pro account charge credit cards directly on the iPhone. iSwipe acts as a gateway to these accounts featuring best-of-class encryption and an easy way to charge credit cards on the go.

My wife and I have a side business that frequently does trade shows and conventions. When I first heard about iSwipe, it seemed like the perfect candidate to test out just how easy it would be to accept credit cards on our iPhone. In the past, we’ve used PayPal’s virtual terminal and borrowed a friends Sprint PCS mobile card to get internet access at our shows. We processed the credit cards on my MacBook and while it’s a fairly easy set up, we couldn’t justify the purchase of the WiFi card just for the small amount of shows we do. iSwipe is the perfect solution as it uses 3G to transmit the encrypted data to the gateway of your choice.

AppNinja’s just released iSwipe 1.2 which fixed a lot of shortcomings of the original version. For instance, in the previous version, you had to enter all of your account credentials by hand into your iPhone which was a royal pain! Some of the credentials from our PayPal account looked like a bazillion characters. Chances of getting them keyed in correctly on iPhones virtual keyboard were iffy. The new version 1.2 allows you to easily copy and paste your credentials into a secured web browser form. It then actually sends the info via a secure key to the iSwipe app on your iPhone. Very simple! Once activated, iSwipe sprung to life and I charged myself $.10 to make sure that it worked and it did!

I had a lot of questions for the developer and he was always very nice and answered all of my questions I had about setting things up on iSwipe. AppNinja’s also has a very good support forum on GetSatisfaction. This is a great place to start if you’d like to get any of your questions about the application answered before purchasing.

We used iSwipe this past weekend to process a few credit cards and it worked flawlessly. Version 1.2 was supposed to allow PayPal Pro users turn off the need to enter a customers address information but it was mistakenly left out. That feature will be available soon in the next version. Other than the pain of entering the address information in, I wish that iSwipe had some form of visual communication while it’s processing the credit card. Some kind of status screen or meter would be good as there were some instances where I got scared that the app had crashed, only to see a second later that the credit card had been processed.

Unfortunately, iSwipe Credit Card Terminal was on sale LAST week so it’s back at it’s original price of $29.99. It’s well worth the cost though as it’s a very easy to use credit card terminal app. While I could just as easily use PayPal’s virtual terminal on my iPhone, the hassle of logging in then waiting for the virtual terminal to load in Mobile Safari is time that I don’t want my customer to wait through. iSwipe is fast and instantly logs into my PayPal Pro account so I can instantly do credit card transactions. More info about iSwipe is available at AppNinjas website.