Has anyone tried using an internet payment service to receive entry fees? I realize this would probably work best for advance entries, but i don’t see many downsides to doing something like this.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or advice would be appreciated.
Thanks … Jim
Yes. I use PayPal. Works fine, though you have to do a little work designing and setting up the page. Cost is 2.9% plus $.30 per transaction. There are also e-commerce packages you can get from your web hosting service. These will get you a slightly lower fee per transaction, but there are significant overhead costs. (I believe this is what Bill Goichberg does, probably not cost-effective for anyone else.)
Taking credit cards on site is a different matter. A PayPal-type system won’t work unless you want to have an extra computer for the entrants to use (since they’re not going to give you their usernames and passwords). You need a business account. I’ve never looked into it, and frankly I don’t think it’s worth the trouble.
It’s worth noting that over the last couple of years on-line entries have become much more popular than snail-mail (probably three or four to one lately).
So it sounds like it woud cost somewhere around $1.00 per entry for what I will be charging for entry fees. I already have paypal for buying and selling on ebay. I probably wouldn’t bother with the extra computer onsite either, for that matter I probably won’t have a computer on site at all, at least starting out. Thanks … Jim
Before we had online registration for USCF national scholastic events, we’d take 100, 200 or even more entries on site.
I doubt we’ve taken more than a couple dozen at any recent national scholastic event.
I think we had between 50 and 75 on site entries at the 2007 US Open out of a total of around 405 entries.
Wow, based on that data, it would be well worth it to accept electronic entries. Thanks for the info Mike.
Regards … Jim
A well-designed online entry site, which does things like check section eligibility requirements and USCF membership status as well as create files that can be imported into your pairing program, can make life a lot easier for the TDs.
Most national scholastic events recently have started ON TIME and with far fewer membership issues to resolve during the tournament, which helps to get the event rated promptly. However, I am not convinced it will affect the total number of entries you get.
and that is the rub…
experienced web page designers are not cheap, securing such a web page against on-line thieves takes ingenuity and skill; it can be done but be very careful lest your web site becomes another site for on-line chicanery
Then why not get together and have one generic webpage made that only needs to be tweaked to add in the necessary for the tournament info? Sort of like this forum, it’s phpBB based but it can be tweaked to make it look the way you want it … to a certain extent anyway. It could then be passed back and forth between TD’s. You wouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel for each different tourney.
Actually the best would be to have a generic website that the TD simply adds the tourney information and the website itself would look something like what you have in the magazine. The exception is that the hyperlinks would direct the user to the specific tourney and then they can fill in the information for their entry there.
You then would only need the pay system(s) to be set up just once. Using, oh say, Verisign and PayPal. It would work as a centralized tournament clearing house.
One additional thought, if you were to use just one specific web address, like, uscftourney.com or some such, then all the tournaments around the country would get listed in one location.
(Wish I had the time, I would love to build such a site. Make a tiny profit off each entry would more than pay for the site.)
Entry fee of $2 … then a dime to the site. $1.90 to the TD. Entry fee of $65 … then perhaps $1.25 to the site.
Just a thought.
Another thought occurred to me. If there was such a centralized tournament clearing house website at the end of the tourney, the cross-table results can be published there, along with any other info the TD would like to add.
(Actually, a whole lot of other ideas are percolating about having such a website, but if no one picks up the ball … no reason to spend any time on them.)
Whoever handles the credit card fees is going to need to cover his costs, which depending on the credit card used will usually be in the range of 3-4% of the total charged, plus 30-50 cents to cover transaction costs. (Some of those transaction costs could be charged even if the credit card is rejected, which means there may be multiple transaction costs for a single entry, or even transaction costs that never result in an entry.)
There may be additional bank fees incurred to get the funds to the organizer.
Designing a generic tournament entry site is not as simple as it seems, because there’s no such thing as a generic tournament. Are there multiple sections, and if so, are there ratings-based or age-based restrictions on those sections?
Can players enter more than one section?
If the event has multiple schedules, can a player enter more than one schedule?
What’s the cutoff for advance entries, and what’s the cutoff for ‘late’ entries?
Oh shoot. I didn’t mean to imply that it would be easy. Heck no, it would take quite a lot of writing to cover all the bases.
But it also doesn’t need to be a full blown system that covers everything to begin with before it would become very useful for a lot of TD’s.
Far and away, most tournaments are small local events that don’t have a lot of differences from one place and time to another. So even if the first “generic” set-up was to cover only basic swisses, it would certainly help out a lot of TD’s. Once that is up and functioning properly, add in quads and just slowly build the site to cover more and more complexities.
The large state and national events would most likely require some additional html work for their “peculiarities”. But if the site is as busy as I think it would be, the webmaster would be fully employed doing just this site. And would then be available for direct contact to work out the needed changes for these unusual situations.
The biggest problem that I would see is the TD’s filling out all the necessary parts so that the website would show only what they needed for their tourney. And that they didn’t overlook anything.
But the number one factor that I see here, is that there is only a small amount of capital required to begin the website. The TD’s don’t pay anything for using the site, at least not directly, the costs are attached to the entry fees for the individual tournament. The larger and more complex tournaments with multiple scheds etc would be the same. Although the costs would be proportionally higher due to some specialized html writing but that would be offset by the larger entry fees and the number of entrants.
So just start on a shoestring budget, get the word out to the TD’s and see if it flies or dies.
At least one implementation in addition to USCF’s internal online registration system exists, at:
signup4chess.com/abouts4c.aspx
I understand that it is widely used in the northwest, and the developer is a long-time software industry producer, whose products include what is perhaps the top selling math study program for kids of the last year or two.
The site indicates that it costs an organizer $1 per player on top of the credit card processing fees (which are pretty much what John Hillery stated).
Just the kind of thing I was talking about. 
Started little and now is growing.
If the site has net access, a website that offered online entry plus handled the pairings and the rating report to USCF might be popular.
That way all a TD would need is a web browser and a printer to run a tournament, so something like the OLPC would work. (And for a small tournament, a printer wouldn’t be necessary.)
If you don’t know what OLPC is, go to olpc.com, my older son thinks there are already dozens of them at Carnegie-Mellon. My younger son just got one as part of the ‘give one get one’ plan, it’s a fascinating device.
This is exactly the kind of thing the central USCF should do. It should reinvest some of the money it makes from tournament fees into a system that would benefit most small to medium sized tournament efforts. This would mostly be a one-time expense, with ongoing benefits at little marginal cost.
Or, if the USCF cannot bring itself to do that, it could at least use a couple of paragraphs in the paper Chess Life magazine to highlight the availability of the web site Hal mentioned…
Gene, I disagree with you that there would be few ongoing costs. Each organizer would have to be taught how to set up a tournament for the entry system and would have to coordinate with the central office on an acceptable transfer-of-payment method (to get the entry fees to the organizer in a timely manner, preferably before the event starts so that the organizer can write prize checks on-site) and agree upon a reasonable set of fees.
These would require a fair amount of support effort. (I estimate that TD/A takes up 10-20 hours a week of staff time to support.)
Then there would be ongoing costs to handle the accounting work.
Since we started doing online registration of national events, I think we’ve had maybe 5 organizers ask us about doing registrations for their events. When we tell them the USCF is probably going to have to deduct 5% or more of the entry fees (to cover credit card and other handling fees), they usually lose interest.
We actually did registrations for the 2006 National Open (a national event, but one organized by a 3rd party, not by the USCF office) online, it took me 20-30 hours to set up all the various options (this was a VERY complicated event, with multiple events, multiple sections within events, plus simuls and other side events), and in the end neither the USCF office nor the organizer (Al Losoff) were sufficiently satisifed with the results to repeat the experiment in 2007.
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I assumed the web site could have tournament instances added to it by any authorized Tournament Organizer. Each instance would have its own PayPal link, and its own link for tourney info. Flexibilities would be limited, but enhance-able over time if necessary.
My understanding of the “Signup4Chess” details was too simplified. But I still presume a reusable web site could be designed that could supply the same logic to each instance of a tournament.
Reasonable concept?
.
I always have a problem when asked whether something like this is possible. The answer must be yes. Is it reasonably possible? I doubt it.
PayPal goes to great lengths to insure security – so much so that it is sometimes a nuisance. In order to set up an account, you have to register a (unique) credit card, then register a bank account and verify it (by entering the amounts of a couple of trace deposits). It would be very difficult to do this through a third-party without giving them access to your credit card and bank account. The only practical way I can see to do it would be for all the money to go into a central account, and then be transferred to the individual organizers. This raises further questions, like what happens if it doesn’t get transferred in time to pay the prize fund. There is also the matter of designing the “Pay” link to get exactly the information you want. As Mike discovered with the on-line TLAs, there are too many different ways to set up a tournament for “one size fits all” to work.
This is exactly the kind of thing that can be done better and cheaper by individual organizers, rather than asking Big Brother to take over.
I asked “reasonable”, not “possible”.
Nobody is suggesting the PayPal account of the local T.O. would be setup through any third party.
“cheaper by individual organizers” – seems unlikely. Few things are cheaper by a hundred redundant efforts.
Not true. It cost me nothing to create the on-line entry pages for my tournaments, because I did it myself. It costs me nothing (beyond the credit-card rip, which is unavoidable) to process them, because I do it myself. If the USCF (or anyone else) sells those services to organizers, they are [b]not[/i] going to provide them for free. TANSTAAFL. (Sorry, Rodney.)
You can’t create a “Buy” link feeding into someone’s account without logging in to that account – which gives you access to the primary bank account. What the service provider would probably do is link the entries to a central account, then transfer the money (which you can do without access) to the individual organizers. If you have a $5000 prize fund to pay out, waiting for someone in the accounting department to get around to transferring the money (with a 3-day wait after they do so) is not an attractive idea. Of course, if you’re talking about a small club tournament with trophy prizes, there isn’t much problem, but why would a tournament like that need on-line entries?