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Pay-as-you-go card terminals that don't need a phone or tablet


pritch

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I'm looking for a card terminal for covering front-of-house sales; for reasons that I won't bore you with, it can't go through our existing card provider that box office are using. It's going to be for smallish amounts of money and is likely to go unused for a month or so at a time, so something with monthly fees isn't the best for us.

 

It also can't be something that's tied to a mobile phone or tablet - it needs to be self contained and work as a device in its own right.

 

So far I've come up with a few options:

 

MyPOS (who have a great range of machines, but seem to excel in the hidden fees department)

SumUp 3G (which looks like quite a nice little option but only offers SMS and e-mail receipts, but that might not be a deal breaker)

Square Terminal (nice range of features, paper receipts, possibly overkill for our needs)

 

Is there anything I'm missing here? And does anyone have any experiences with any of the above?

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We use iZettle at my venue for box office and bar takings. Yes, it is tied to a tablet or phone which uses the venue's wifi but if you can spring for a second hand iPad (has to be later than iPad 2, though) it's a great little system.

You can set products up easily so the web based app can then give you reports on exactly which product was purchased etc.

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Is it for small fixed sums? I wonder if the new tap-to-donate units might be of use?

 

No, it's far bar takings so it's going to be quite variable.

 

 

We use iZettle at my venue for box office and bar takings. Yes, it is tied to a tablet or phone which uses the venue's wifi but if you can spring for a second hand iPad (has to be later than iPad 2, though) it's a great little system.

You can set products up easily so the web based app can then give you reports on exactly which product was purchased etc.

 

I'm probably not going to get anyone else to go along with that idea. I do like some of the iPad based POS systems I've seen, but as we've not long had a new till I don't think the idea of replacing it will go down well.

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I've used the Square app successfully on cheap second hand phones (no sim, just on wifi) and tablets with the card reader glued to the back. You can get an ipad3 or ipad mini on ebay in reasonable condition for as little as £40, plus £30 for the square card reader. If you don't need to print receipts thats an economical way to do it. If you need a receipt printer as well, you may as well buy the square terminal and get it all in one for a little extra money.

 

I suspect the square terminal is basically just a generic android phone in a case with the card reader and receipt printer, no need for them to reinvent the wheel and make it all from scratch.....

Edited by adamharman
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If you've just had a new till, have you checked what it will do? Likely a new POS setup will have some card payment facility..

 

It's quite a basic one - to call it POS would be rather overstating its capabilities!

 

I'll have a look into the tablet/phone based options; I've been having a bit of a look at the Square app and it seems quite impressive and easy to use, especially with the ability to add nice pictures of the stock. Still not sure how well it'll be received, but I'll add it to my list of things to consider.

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We use iZettle at my venue for box office and bar takings. Yes, it is tied to a tablet or phone which uses the venue's wifi but if you can spring for a second hand iPad (has to be later than iPad 2, though) it's a great little system.

You can set products up easily so the web based app can then give you reports on exactly which product was purchased etc.

 

I'm probably not going to get anyone else to go along with that idea. I do like some of the iPad based POS systems I've seen, but as we've not long had a new till I don't think the idea of replacing it will go down well.

No - we don't use it for breaking down bar takings - I meant we have product IDs for

 

Bar takings (that's just one option)

Box Office sales for each individual show (so that's loads of options)

Concessions sales (again just one option)

One or two other specified sales options.

 

When the bar staff ring in the sales on the tills using the EPOS buttons they then take that total over to the iZettle iPad and simply hit the 'Bar sales' icon and the amount and the iZettle card reader fires up - pretty simple and quick.

 

 

 

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Some of the tablet/phone fear can be lessened by how you sell it. If it's an 'inexpensive securely locked down multi purpose hardware platform' that sometimes is easier to sell to technophobes than 'a cheap android tablet'. As highlighted above, most of the actual hardware platforms are tablets/phones inside, it's very hard to compete on manufacture cost with the phone makers. Delete all unnecessary apps, move all undeleteable apps to second home page, then it is unlock and press the only app available to press.
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Although it does have monthly rental, I found that the Worldpay offering is quite good. There are no minimum fees or minimum transaction amounts. I would say though, that if you are going months at a time without taking card payments do you really need the facility?
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Although it does have monthly rental, I found that the Worldpay offering is quite good. There are no minimum fees or minimum transaction amounts. I would say though, that if you are going months at a time without taking card payments do you really need the facility?

 

We're in the process of moving away from Worldpay, who have been slowly creeping up their charges whilst reducing the features on offer. They might have different things on offer for newer/smaller customers, but if you do go with them keep an eye on what happens once you're out of a fixed contract.

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We use iZettle too for our bar and also our box office. We have a card device and iPad at each point. x1 iPad was new and x1 was second hand. I have quite a few issues with reliability but that's due to our dodgy BT wifi router and its location when our bar fills up with people the signal becomes pretty rubbish. I'm hoping that a new access point at the bar will be the solution to this.

 

 

I did lots of research with this before I purchased them and found iZettle to be the best of the bunch, in terms of price and features and ongoing support, its also very popular so likely to be supported for time to come. I looked at Clover too but in reality, for a low-cost professional solution iZettle came up trumps.

 

Interestingly, recently our bank asked us who we process card payments with and wanted to know if they could offer anything, after letting them know the fee % they could not beat it, but it would be interesting to see what they could offer in terms of mobile devices. If I could have found a 3G/4G device cheap enough I would have purchased one, so will follow this thread.

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