Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Interface Credit Card with a Cash Register

Interfacing Credit Card Terminals to a Cash Register is not only possible it is becoming a standard process. There are many reasons to Integrate Credit Card Payments to your Cash Register.

  • Integrated Credit Card Payments reduces cashier fraud at the Cash Register
  • By interfacing the Credit Card transactions to your Cash Register you eliminate the need to re-enter or double enter the sales amount, which greatly reduces errors.
  • Faster Transactions
  • Less equipment on your counter
  • Very Cost Effective
  • High Speed or dial up (or both)
  • Integrated Gift Card Programs as well

There is only one company in the world that makes Credit Card terminals that interface to Cash Registers that I know of. So forget about interfacing your existing Verifone or Hypercom terminal to your cash register. The terminals that interface are from Datacap Systems. Datacap makes several terminals that Interface to Cash Registers from the No Load Twin Tran, The IPTran, The 162ML and 162SL terminals. All of the Datacap terminals require a cash register to operate and will not work as standalones. Every Datacap product uses the printer and 10 Key keypad of the cash register. Depending on which Cash Register you choose to interface the Datacap you will be able to process Credit Cards, Debit Cards with Pin, Check Cards, Gift Cards, and EBT.

Datacap products are only available via Cash Register / POS Dealers and are not available from most merchant services providors. Prices range from $600.00 to $1500.00 depending on which make and model and features required. Some cash registers can share a single Datacap product, which will help lower your start up cost. So as an example lets say you have 4 Sam4s ER-7000 Cash Registers you want to integrate credit cards with. You could use on Twin Tran for all 4 machines via the Cash Registers IRC feature and then add an inexpensive magnetic card reader to each register. So you would be able to process credit card at all 4 registers for a cost of $1716.00 total which is only $429.00 per cash register. That is less then the cost of 4 standalone credit card terminals in most cases and don't forget all the fraud and errors you will stop by integrating your credit card payments. There is also a processing company Mercury Payment Systems that will lease/rent you a Twin Tran for only $12.50 per month (with lifetime warranty) and you only have to buy the magnetic card readers. So using Mercury for the same aformentioned 4 register system your start up cost would only be $516.00 for 4 readers and $12.50 per month. Mercury also offers integrated Gift Card as well as Credit Card.

The bottom line on Integrated Credit Card Cash Registers is that it works very well these days and is very cost effective. You can increase your bottom line by stopping the fraud and errors

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