Wireless Credit Card Processing
Walk into a typical store or small business and you’ll see a credit card processing machine plugged into the wall and into the phone. In fact, many of us have had the experience of waiting for someone in the office to get off the phone so the credit card transaction could be completed. Even small ecommerce operations often use those machines, keying in transactions at the end of the day at a desk.
Sometimes, though, you want to take credit transactions away from that machine, in places where phones and electric outlets may be in short supply. You may take an order in someone’s home or in a coffee shop. You might make sales in your customers’ offices – are you going to ask to plus your machine in on their desks? You might make sales at trade shows, concerts, or festivals.
For those sales, you used to have tough choices to make. If you refused to accept credit cards, you took a chance of alienating customers and losing sales. Offering discounts for cash would eat into your profit margin, and might not be allowed in all states. So you’d pull out the knucklebuster, the metal slide machine that took a fuzzy impression of your customer’s credit card.
You had to hope you’d be able to read those numbers at the end of the day when you keyed in the transactions. You also had to hope that the transactions would be accepted, because you had already produced the merchandise. Often, you’d also pay a higher fee for each and every one of those transactions, because you keyed them in instead of swiping them.
Those were the bad old days. Now, wireless credit card processing is a practical option.
Wireless processing lets you swipe the card and enter the total for the sale into the wireless credit card machine. The experience is the same for your customer as if you were back in that traditional store with a traditional credit card processing machine.
The signal is sent from the wireless credit card machine’s terminal to a wireless tower, much the same way that a cell phone connects to a tower and sends a signal. The information is then sent on to the processor and then to the bank that issued the credit card. The bank checks to make sure that the funds are available and sends an approval number to the processor. The processor sends the information back to the wireless credit card machine.
The whole process takes about ten seconds. That’s just enough time to compliment your customer’s excellent taste or ask if he’d like a bag.
At the end of the day, you settle your machine just as you settle a traditional credit card processing machine. You get the lower fees of a transaction that is “swiped” rather than keyed in, and you don’t have to spend the whole evening keying in those transactions. You also don’t have to worry about charging the wrong person because you couldn’t read those fuzzy numbers.
The advantages are clear. There’s no need to wait any longer to set up your wireless credit card processing system.
wireless credit card machine
