Credit Card Payments for Everyone!

Today we’re excited to announce that our testing is completed and we’re rolling out credit card payments for all teachers located in the US and Canada! Over the next few weeks you’ll receive an email with all the details. (For those of you outside North America, we’re working on a solution for you too. Don’t worry, you’re not forgotten!)

Great Rates for Great Teachers

We’re pleased to announce that credit card payments are available through PayPal Pro. A PayPal Pro account is different from a regular PayPal personal or business account because you can accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express cards directly. Usually PayPal Pro costs $30/mo, but the fee is waived for TutorBird members.

Details on how to upgrade to PayPal Pro are available inside your TutorBird account (and we’ll be sending out emails this week). Once your account is upgraded, parents and students will have the option to pay with a credit card directly and retain their card information on file for faster, easier payments in the future.

Why Not Stripe?

A number of you have emailed us asking for integration with Stripe.com. There are two major reasons we selected PayPal Pro over Stripe:

Lower Rates: We were able to get a great group rate for payment processing from PayPal. Because we represent a large number of teachers, we approached a number of payment processing companies to get a better deal on your behalf. PayPal stepped up to the plate and offered lower processing rates than anyone else. This is especially good for independent tutors, as your monthly transaction volume probably wouldn’t qualify you for any special rates.

Simplicity: Instead of managing two accounts (one for PayPal and one for credit cards) you can do everything with one PayPal Pro account. If you’re already comfortable with PayPal, then there’s nothing new to learn and only one company to deal with.

In addition to this exciting news, we’ve made the following changes to TutorBird this week:

• We’ve removed the “Symbol” font from the website editor because it was causing problems for some sites.
• If you use the GPS feature in TutorBird to track your trips, it will now determine the name of your destination when your trip ends instead of just the address. (i.e. “Smith Family Home”)

We hope you enjoy these changes! Have a great week everyone.

– The TutorBird Team