Today, we’re diving deep into the world of business technology and asking the burning question, “Is it time to upgrade your point of sale system?” Trust me, you won’t want to miss out on this one!
In this video, we’ll be shedding light on the importance of staying ahead in the ever-evolving realm of point of sale systems. Whether you’re a small business owner or an aspiring entrepreneur, this is the perfect opportunity to gather some valuable insights. So, grab your favorite snack, get comfy, and let’s embark on this knowledge-packed journey together!
Throughout the video, we’ll be delving into the various signs that indicate it might be time for you to upgrade your point of sale system. We’ll cover everything from outdated hardware to limited functionality and the need for better analytics. We’ll also explore the potential benefits that come with embracing modern point of sale solutions.
We’ll provide you with real-life examples and practical tips to help you make an informed decision. Our aim is to empower you with the knowledge to take your business to new heights. So get ready to gain a competitive edge in the market by embracing the wonders of cutting-edge point of sale technology.
Don’t worry if you’re new to the topic; we’ve got you covered! We’ll break down complex concepts into easy-to-understand terms, ensuring that everyone can follow along and learn something new. By the end of this video, you’ll be equipped with the know-how to evaluate your current point of sale system and determine whether an upgrade is the right move for you.
So, my friends, make sure you hit that “subscribe” button and turn on the notification bell, because you definitely don’t want to miss our captivating exploration of the question, “Is it time to upgrade your point of sale system?” Get ready to take your business to the next level! Join us on this exciting adventure, and together, let’s unlock the full potential of modern point of sale technology. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed!
Remember to leave your comments and questions below; we love hearing from our amazing community. Until then, stay curious, keep learning, and I’ll catch you in the video!
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Video Transcription
Yo, what’s up everybody? It’s Justin Live from B2 B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Joe Namath of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman, and we’ll be providing you with educational information about FinTech. Small business payment processing and the technology businesses are using in the world today.
And in today’s podcast, we’ll be discussing everything that you could possibly imagine when it comes to point of sale systems. P os, I’m not gonna say it, I wanna say it. Your piece it anyway. I didn’t say it. I did say it. Sorry. I said it. It is what it is. It is what it is, kid. So yeah, man, Alan has 20 years of experience in the merchant services world and there’s a few things that are coming up that will be changing about your.
Point of sale system. If you have one of those in your business. Yeah. Point of sale covers everything, all whatever, devices and systems. Typically, when I think of a point of sale system, which most people probably will, they’ll think of a actual cash register, right? Yeah. It covers more than that, but there’s a lot more to it than just that.
Yes, there’s, anyway, he’s going to get into all that stuff. The dirty stuff and we’re gonna listen and we’re gonna ask questions if we need to. And then yeah man. So let’s get into painted the point of sales and everything you need to know about it. So we had a good time yesterday. We went out to the multi chamber trade show, the trade show.
Shout out to the piano man. That guy was going. Crazy. Yeah, that was a little bit too much. The volume was on 10. But the, it was lit. It was about five chambers. There was a lot of people that came through, talked to a lot of business owners, showed them different technology that’s out there.
Yeah, they, yeah, it was amazing. People seemed to be quite enthused about a lot of it. So there were, huh. There were a lot of people there. To be honest, I was surprised. I, I. Didn’t think that many people. Where did all the kids come from though? There were some schools there and I guess they were promoting the school.
But where did all the no. There was just kids. Yeah, they were from the school. No, not them kids. Which kids? The other kids. The other, all the kids from the schools had on uniforms. I guess some of the people brought their kids with them. Yeah, so I. That was just take your kid to work day.
That was that was interesting. They were spinning the wheel and winning. Yeah. We gave away some socks and sands, some socks and some pens. I gave that one girl a mug. She was not impressed. That was fun. She did not like, like the mug. She’s like a mug. Oh, hopefully she thought I’ll give it to my dad or something.
Or mom. Yeah. Yeah what’s new otherwise, man, what do you got going in? We got some new products we’re working on bringing forward and. That’s what you know, it’s all about technology tech technology changes all the time. Just like the book Who Moved My Cheese? The cheese moves, technology changes, we go with the flow.
Speaking of that, what’s changing in this P os? So world, yeah, things change with like p with PCI compliance, which is the payment security compliance that. Software and hardware has to be certified. So what happens is we’re coming into a period now where there’s gonna be a lot of things expiring, okay?
And a lot of the things expiring. Expiring for various reasons. Reasons being the equipment’s been around a long time and they can’t upgrade it cuz they can’t hold enough memory. Okay? You’re gonna have companies. There’s a lot of companies who got sold. So the people who bought those systems are not gonna re-up the PCI compliance on the old systems.
Those systems are gonna have to be upgraded to new software or replaced. Okay. New stuff. You’re gonna have, other hardware. That’s gonna be sent out to pasture because, credit card machines basically, until a few years ago, were not really like Android. But now all of them, all the new stuff is all Android based.
And the reason it’s all Android based is those systems can last longer, which is not so good for the manufacturer. They last longer and. They’ve doubled in price since the, the pandemic. I believe it. So the, prices have doubled. Stuff that was a couple hundred bucks is now four to $500.
Things that were 1200 are now 2,400. So the, so prices have changed and that’s, and then new, newer things come into the market. And then, so let’s talk about it. So you’re gonna hear, you might hear things like, oh, my pin pad broke. And I need a new pin pad. And then they might have to say besides the pin pad you got to, you might need a new pin pad, a different type of pin pad, because the pin pad’s no longer supported, so they’re like retired.
There was a list of about 20 of ’em, retired for 20, at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, but you can use ’em until 2026. So there’s nothing wrong with the equipment, just if it breaks, you’re gonna, unless you have to get some new stuff, you have to get, if they’re, if who you work with, if they have a replacement, obviously they can replace it, but if they don’t have a replacement, then you have to upgrade to the newer model.
Got it. So that’s just what happens when that happens, that what can also happen is the pin pad breaks and then you gotta replace the terminal and the pin pad. That’s why a lot of times I tell merchants, you don’t, might not like it being in the rental program. It’s a lot better to be in the rental program cuz if anything breaks, then it gets replaced.
Yeah, I like that. I would definitely hop on the rental. Yeah. Because that way if anything has to get upgraded, you get upgraded automatically. No charge cuz you’re paying a rental fee. And so that’s not, it’s not too much to worry about, but don’t get scared when people say, oh, that device is end of life.
You can look it up online and you’ll see it says, oh, it’s end of life, but you can still use the device for three, four more years. They’re just not manufacturing it anymore. The company’s not manufacturing it. But if I were of business, I wouldn’t even risk any of it. Why would no, just say it’s like a company, like a web developer running on a Windows seven.
No, I just say like with come on pads and stuff. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. If, when it, if you see, you start to have some problems with it, then it’s time to do an upgrade. Yeah, no, yeah, that’s fine. Yeah. But because it’s, they’re not going, if it’s not getting updates, bro, I wouldn’t be messing around with that.
No, they’re updating it. They’re just, that’s, it’s just in retirement money you said? No. Oh no. Okay. Yeah, they, nevermind. They’re not, they upgrade the software and everything, but they’re not making any more of ’em. So the stock’s gonna run out at some point. That’s the whole point, and then you’re gonna have to upgrade.
One other thing is like the point terminal. So that company point got bought out by GoDaddy and then, so now there’s no more point terminal, it’s GoDaddy’s terminal. So there’s a lot of people that were using the Point terminal. Now their terminal breaks, then they can’t get a new one unless they go to GoDaddy.
But then, I was talking to one of the merchants who had it, and then he starts telling me about the software he is using in there. And I’m like that software is retired. Not that software’s not, it doesn’t even work anymore. Yeah, it doesn’t, E doesn’t exist anymore. So because they changed the whole thing, the whole, the terminal is different.
Has a bigger roll of paper in it now. It, no, I’m just saying like they improved the terminal and then the software in the terminal is different than what was in there before they got, hence an old version. Hence it being new, right? So some people have said, oh, what do I replace it with? We’ve given various different suggestions, can switch over to GoDaddy Payments, who we work with, or you can.
Get, move up into a full point of sale system or swipe simple is also a good option. Put it on a What’s Swipe simple. So swipe simple is like a simple type point of sale program. We just didn’t install. We just put it in this event venue out in Vegas. So they used an eight inch Samsung tablet.
And then put it on a stand cuz they’re not taking cash. And then we put a little square, a little Bluetooth device that’s on a charging stand and next to it. So then people can come up, they can ring the person up, they can flip it over, show ’em how much it is. And the person can just tap their card on the thing or stick their card in and do the done or wave their phone on it and do a charge.
Nice. And then, no paper receipt, we’re, we’re in whatever Green America now. So you can get, yeah, we should be right. So you guys are the ones that ruined it. Oh, come on. No, I’m just messing with you. So the No, but I’m just saying, so like with swipe simple, you get texts and email receipts.
Just the point did text and email receipts. I think other credit card machines need to catch up. Obviously some businesses, let’s say you’re at a strip club. I don’t want a text receipt for the strip club. Why not? Or an email receipt. Why not? Maybe my wife will see it. I’m not married, man.
All you men that can’t go to a strip club should be ashamed of yourselves, man. Come on man. A lot of people take your wife with you. I bet you’ll have a ball. Yeah. Some people might not want that receipt in there when their wife scrolls through. If it’s that bad at home and you’re hiding to go to the strip club, man, get a divorce.
They say, oh, what is this? You were at? Vegas cabaret the day I can’t go do something because nevermind. But I’m just saying I love you Jina. But some of the other credit card machines need to catch up to this text, email receipt thing, because I think that’s the wave of the future.
We do a lot of the swipe simple because people like it with text, email receipt, so people like that. Yeah, no, I don’t ever hear anyone really complaining about swipe simple except for Dave. He complained about it until he installed it in that place in Vegas and they love it. So now they, so now he’s always happy with it.
Yeah. He never used it. If you never, there you go, Dave. I like it. I use it all the time for places. It’s a great, it’s a great tool because you can have it in a terminal, on a tablet in your office, have a little mobile device. It’s pretty flexible. The only thing they don’t, that, that they should add to it is they should have a e-commerce plugin.
And then it would be a fully functional thing for small businesses. But that’s, that’s one thing. Also, you could upgrade from that, from a point to a, to a point of sale system, which we’re working on a couple of two new ones to bring into our fold. Nice. Cuz we look for things that are gonna be, we look, we are looking at a couple now, one, So the one that’s gonna come first is very afford, the price is very affordable, less than a clover station, which is doubled in price and has text, email receipt so that it’s, and it very efficient and good customer service.
There’s, but we’re gonna get into stuff like that. Now here’s the next one. This one actually shocked me when I read it. I saw it. I saw an article about it and then I was like, that possibly can’t be true. And then I googled it about QuickBooks point of sale. They’re putting that thing to pasture lay.
There ain’t no reason to kick a dead horse, so they’re October, 2023. You will not be able to get any support for QuickBooks pos. They’re cutting the support and they’re cutting out. If you have payments rolling through there, that’s gone too Donezo. So I would say if you have QuickBooks point of sale, you need to do an upgrade.
And Hallt uss man, we can get you. We got a trade-in program. Trade-in program for your QuickBooks point of sale. Yes. And it ends in 159 days. 160 something days. October hundred 50, 23 October, now’s the time to look for a replacement because replacing a point of sale sometimes cannot be can be easy, sometimes it cannot be, can be a big job.
Depends on how many inventory items you have, and it But we have, we came up with a way how to do it where you can format your in, download your inventory, reformat it onto the, I was gonna say, there’s no way to down, do like a spreadsheet or something. Yeah, they, yeah. You download it onto a spreadsheet or a csv, then you might have to move the columns around, for the new point of sale. And then you. You send it in, upload it, you’re ready to go bong, restore your whole bing bong. So we came up with a way to do it pretty easily. I like it. Retail point of sale has been, a challenge for us and, finding an affordable solution.
But we’ve found two affordable solutions that we have right now, and they’re good good solutions to replace QuickBooks or. Even Clover in some cases, cuz we’re gonna get to Clover in a minute and we’ll I guess we could go to Clover now and come back to the, come back to the next subject. So with Clover is another system, the pandemic, through this thing into a loop because the parts come from China, CH comes from China, it’s all made in China, and people couldn’t get parts and then they came out with.
Two new clovers, and then now they release clover version three. And then we had a client call us the other day who we don’t want, we didn’t want them to buy a clover, and now they’re freaking out because they’re opening up another location. And when we told them how much a clover is, they were like, huh, because the price is like almost double what it used to be.
And then, They also have something broken on one of their other clovers and then we tried to get a part for it and there’s no parts. And the pro problem is you can’t take one from somebody else because all the serial numbers are asi. They take the serial number for the printer and assign it to your business.
So you can’t take it from Justin’s business. He has it. He went out, I can’t resell mine or something. You could to somebody who’s used. He wants to use the same bank you used with the clover system? The same bank? Yeah, the same credit card processor. Oh, okay. Cause it’s assigned to them. You can’t do, if you bought it from Bank of America, you gotta use it with Bank of America.
It has to be used with a Bank of America merchant account. You can’t, and Clover won’t reprogram it. No. Only what that bank Yep. They’re how they assigned them all. It’s crazy. You can’t. That’s, that is not okay. Most equipment that you buy today, point of sale, all of the vendors have aligned themselves with credit card processors.
So very few things. That’s why there’s a big changeover. So Clover has these, a lot of older systems out there and now the parts are running out cuz they stopped making the parts in China right. During the pandemic. So the parts are running out. And then they vet version two, which was really cool.
Then the parts ran out on that. So now they came out with version three. The version three stuff. You can’t use the parts from version three on the version two. So that’s done. You gotta buy a whole new system. And then they made another change in the new system, and then they have two levels in the system.
So you have to, if you want like all the features for a sit down restaurant. You gotta get the highest clover. What was the prices for like before the pandemic? Oh, like 1200 for a station. And how much does it cost now? Close to 2,400 with all the fees, cuz you gotta pay encryption fees, deployment fees, blah, blah, blah.
And they raise the price on all the apps. So the app for the restaurant used to be 44, now it’s 64 and that’s per station. Plus you gotta pay the clover fees. And if you’re using the dual pricing cash discount come to Nationwide Payment Systems. Yeah. So Clover is not as affordable as it once used to be.
And the price for the flex was around 500. And now those are like, almost, those are about nine 50. What is that? It’s the small handheld. Oh, so you, but cuz I was talking to a cl merchant, not a client of ours. Somebody had called me up and said, Hey, what do you know about this clover? I had bought a clover and then some of the features aren’t working and blah, blah, blah.
I said, I never heard. I never heard that before. And then sure enough I said let me find out. And I said you better talk to whoever you bought it from because they sold you the wrong clover. They sold them the one in the middle and he needs the highest one. Damn. Because apparently the app, some of the apps don’t work on the middle version.
That’s ridiculous. Of the hardware, why they came out with two versions of hardware. I don’t know, but they did F freemium and pro. Yeah, pretty much that’s what it is. That’s every software development company. Software as a service company. That’s the business model. Yeah. They do freemium, but this is basically like the hardware.
Obviously something is not sufficient in there to run some of the apps cuz they try to install some of the apps. And it didn’t work. So now they got to deal with, I told them, I said, I hope you have the boxes, cuz if you don’t have the boxes, Clover ain’t taking it back. I tell merchants all the time, man, don’t throw the boxes away till you know that you’re gonna, there’s no, there’s, there’s usually like a 30 day, like process.
30 days. You could send it back if you have the box. We had a client one time, they bought five. Point of sale devices, then they never opened the place up, COVID hit. Then we ended up trying to, took us a couple of months to get ’em back. We got ’em back then the guy didn’t have the boxes. I go, dude, I says to the customer, I go, we can’t send these back.
Now we’re gonna have to, we can only sell ’em as used cuz we don’t have the boxes. So we ended up having to sell ’em and then, whatever. We gave the guys some of his money back. Not all of it. He didn’t like that, but, And you threw the boxes away, idiot. You can’t. If they had the box, we could have sent it back.
You told ’em to keep the box, right? Yep. We told them. Keep the boxes. Keep the box, man. I don’t know. You buy a new iPhone, you’re not throwing away the box the first week You get it. You jackass. Sorry. Yeah, keep the box. Another big change that’s going on is restaurant point of sale, so as restaurant point of sale.
There’s been a bunch of companies that got bought up and now the company one, the companies who bought those softwares, they’re not renewing the pci, they’re, so those are gonna end of life. And I know it cuz I have two customers right now that have a point of sale. I don’t wanna say the name. It got bought by another company.
We don’t do business with them, so we’re not gonna say their name. And so they told them, they said you have to upgrade to. This other thing and buy new POS system so they don’t want to And it and the, and they like don’t like that, so they don’t like that system. So you sounds whack. There’s a lot of that going on where, you have couple of companies like that got absorbed all by shift four.
So they’re taking all those softwares and they’re gonna try to bundle ’em all into one software now, like 5, 6, 7. Restaurant softwares and then just have one restaurant software called what are they calling it now? I can’t even remember the name of it right now. That kind of makes sense though.
It’s just gonna be expensive. Probably. I don’t know if it’s gonna be expensive. I don’t know if it’s gonna be as good as the ones that people were using before. Cuz one of the things people, we’ll get into some stuff about point of sale. So with point, with restaurant, point of sale, you just have to, you need to, not wait till the end. You need to find out like what’s, like when they tell you, oh, you might have to upgrade. It might be time to shop around and look at some other stuff. We have a partnership with a really nice restaurant bar point of sale.
That’s a hybrid. And one of the things I don’t like that I see in the restaurant point of sale industry is most of the stuff that’s out there is all cloud-based. And if you have a really busy restaurant or you have a really busy bar that doesn’t always perform the best when everything is up in the cloud.
Oh yeah, I can imagine. And then, but we’re gonna talk more about like internet and your business, but you can’t, but we are working with a company as a hybrid system. So being that it’s a hybrid system, two of the, you have to get a minimum of two stations. With this system because those act as the servers, and that helps the system run faster.
Makes sense. Be more reliable that way, and then if you ever have to replace, let’s say you have five or six of them in a place, you have to replace one. You just bring it, get a new one, come a new one comes in, plug it in, hook it up, and then. Ba boom, they can get, take, everything can go into there and you’re not smart downloading it all off of the internet.
They can just suck it off one of the, one of the, one of the servers that’s very smart and it’d be a lot faster. So that’s, things to consider, re restaurant, restaurants, they’re restaurants. I see a lot of them struggling, like Aloha pos. They had two outages recently where the whole.
Their whole backend system went down and that caused a lot of phone calls to people who were on their backend. When you know when you’re using different systems and everything is proprietary, make sure what’s going on. Make sure, always tell restaurants, have a backup plan like your internet goes out.
Make sure you put in a router that has a prepaid 4G 5G card on it. So that if your internet goes out, you still have 4g, 5g. You probably won’t even notice it if your internet goes out for a couple hours cuz the router just switches over to that. Very, yeah, that’s, and it’s very important to do that.
That’s key. And your business. And many times, like re restaurants will say to me, oh, why do we need that? Why do we just in case, I mean you live in South, we live in South Florida, so Yeah. During this last storm, I’m. Guaranteeing some companies, businesses went out of power, right? And then also, for your business, do you have a backup like handheld credit card machine?
Credit card device you can just put on your phone use with your phone or a tablet or something and go off cellular. So you can still charge credit cards. I tell people like, you gotta, back in the old days you used to be get an, do you have an imprint and some slips, Now it’s, you have a, a device to use with your phone, sorry.
Or you could get a, or you could get an extra merchant account with us and you just install an app on your phone and boom, you can take credit cards. You don’t even need a device done. So there’s a lot of options to do, to make sure you have credit card processing when they’re, when the internet is completely out.
And so let’s talk about, Now, let’s say you’re out and you need to shop for a new point of sale system. Some of the things you should consider, do you want a cloud system or a hybrid system? So cloud, everything’s up in the cloud. Hybrid means there’s an actual computer there, and some of the information or all of the information is on that computer or computers and also in the cloud.
So that’s one thing to consider. Some people don’t want to use, like Dave was, we were talking about the swipe simple. It’s oh eight inch tablet. It’s small. Young people don’t care about that. Maybe somebody that’s old doesn’t want to use an eight inch tablet. Yeah. I don’t care about that either.
I know, but some, so you gotta consider what kind of device is it? Is it eight inch tablet? Is it a bigger tablet? What kind of devices are you using? A 17 inch tab, like mo, like a point of sale or like a bar restaurant. If you have a lot of items or you need to do things fast, maybe you want to have a 17 inch tablet.
Instead of a eight inch tablet. Because see, I, you’d be beneficial, right? Cuz you have more items to deal with, more items. So those are things to consider. Screen size and all of that. I don’t like, personally, I am not a fan of iPads being used for point of sale, because one of the dangers with iPads is Apple will upgrade to iOS.
Then you get a message on your iPad, upgrade to iOS. The question you should be asking yourself is, should I upgrade to iOS or call the point of sale company first and make sure I can upgrade to iOS? Because let me tell you, we’ve had customers using an iPad point of sale. They upgrade the iOS, then the point of sale stops working and then it’s a big process to dial it back to the old iOS.
You gotta call like Apple support. You gotta know what you’re doing. Like you have to go in and rev, install the one, the previous version because then because Apple upgrades to iOS and then everybody who’s got a app’s gotta scramble. Because then all of a sudden you got a bunch of apps that don’t work.
That’s Apple’s famous for that. Yeah. So now a lot of the point of sale companies switch to Android cuz Android’s a pretty generic platform and they don’t have to, and you don’t have to deal with that. You just have to be on version five or up on most of the point of sale stuff. Nice. Version five and up.
So those are things to consider, do you like a small tablet? You don’t like a small tablet? What size do you want to screen Cloud hybrid? It’s a lot to think about. Cost call. We’ll get to that then next thing you gotta think about is internet. One of the things restaurants and a lot of businesses don’t think about is, when people come into your business, there’s, you have to have, you need to have, you want to be secure.
So you should have two Internet. Internet or even three internet circuits. If I owned a restaurant and or a business where I have cameras, internet for my business and point of sale, and then guest internet, I would’ve three separate internets. So three, I’d have three Comcast come in and put three things in, or even say, oh, I’m gonna put two Comcast and one at and t.
You can’t do that though. You can. Oh yeah. I’ve seen business not gonna work. You don’t, you use it for the guest internet. That way. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying because you’ll be constantly fighting for the, so the whole thing is you want to make sure that you don’t have your guests on the same internet that you’re running your point of sale.
And a lot of times you don’t want to have your cameras cuz maybe you’re remote promoting in from your house, looking at the cameras you don’t want to have, and then that opens up the circuit. You don’t want that on the same router with your point of sight. It’s not suggested. If you do it, you better have a good IT person that knows how to secure that down really well.
Yeah, I don’t, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. So it’s better if it’s separate. Those are things to consider with your internet connection. Then the next thing is, a list of things that you need to think about. What is my budget? Are you gonna buy this system? Are you gonna. You do to get on a program where it’s hardware and software as a service.
What are the pros and the cons of all that? What’s the warranty look like? Okay. Then you gotta think about are there any monthly fees that go along with this system? Are there SAS fees? Most companies now have SAS fees. Yeah, so what are those SAS fees? Software as a service fee. That’s why sometimes it’s better if you do hardware and software as a service.
You’re getting a bundle. Like one, the company one, the company we’re working with for restaurants, they have a three year package, hardware and software as a service, and then the equipment’s fully warrantied, so anything breaks, they replace it. Oh, that’s nice. So it’s a nice thing, so you wanna understand what’s the warranty, if I buy it, what’s the warranty?
The warranty might only be for a year, do you want to take that chance? In a bar restaurant atmosphere, no. You might have to replace a printer. That could be small. But what if somebody smashed a screen that’s a thousand dollars? Item features. Now here’s the thing I always talk about, like I was never a fan of Clover because you had to buy all these apps and I would see customers telling me, spending 150, $200 per station on apps.
So that’s a lot of apps to pay for. And if you have five stations at 200 bucks, that’s a lot of money. So what do the features are there? What features are you getting? What features do you need? Do they, does anything cost extra? And what is that extra? So you want to make sure about that. Cause you know it starts to add.
Like I tell people with Clover, it all adds up. Anything you want to add on is an add on. A lot of the other newer systems I see coming out, a lot of the stuff that’s extra on clover is included. Wow. So so those systems work, they look and feel like Clover, cuz people have sat back and watched them and copied them now, yeah. And then made it less expensive cuz they put all the features in. So now it’s not just an app store. Ease of use, how easy is it to use the system, access the system on the back end? What is that scalability? That’s another thing that you need to make sure about. Like we, I met with somebody recently and they said, oh, we have, we want to put three stations in the restaurant, then we need one station to put in the on the.
Another state, a fourth station in the restaurant for, they have a lot of people that call up and order over the phone, which I didn’t know was so popular. I saw a survey and the survey said, what’s the percentage, someone took a survey. So what was the percentage of people that like to order online versus people who call on the phone?
What do you think the answer was at a, I’m gonna say, 70 30 it was actually about 45% for the online and 55% for the phone. And I get, might be like some city, people that I guess they don’t like call, they like ordering over the phone. They’re food. Maybe they have special diet or whatever.
Yeah. I guess you’re right, because I can’t order over the internet. Usually, unless it’s a vegetarian restaurant, because I know like we order food for the office and Anna always calls up on the phone and says, oh, I want to make sure you know this, and this is done right. Cuz it’s special and they don’t always follow instructions.
So because of that, a lot of people like order over the phone. Makes sense. And probably age wise too. Like my son, he’ll order off an app some, I don’t always trust it, if I’m gonna change something, I don’t think I’ve ever ordered food off an app before, really off an app.
Scalability’s another thing you want to make sure, like how easy is it to get another station to do an add-on? Oh, do I don’t want to do pay at the table now, but maybe I want to do it later. How does that get added on? So what is the, how’s the scalability work? Another guy we met with wanted to do, he says also has a food truck.
So how can he use one of the stations on his food truck? So we talked, told him like, take a handheld and do it, or use it on the food truck, huh? Then just we’ll create another food truck menu, like you can create breakfast, lunch, dinner, food, truck menu. I’m smart. So it’s pretty easy. Integration.
So integration. Oh, sup. Oh, after that, scale support. What’s the support look like? Who, how do you get support? What is, what does support look like? I always tell people, there’s two kinds of support, basic support and emergency support. Basic support is, oh, I forgot how to run this report.
And either you look online or you call up during regular business hours. But you don’t call it two in the morning. It’s not an emergency. Emergency is the system’s not working? I might troll you so hard. You call me at two o’clock in the morning, man. So you have to, you just need to, it’s important that, merchants have the right expectation of, what the level of support is gonna be in.
And then the next thing is integrate. Most systems have 24 hour support. But it’s mostly geared towards like emergencies, basic things. Usually you can go to the FAQ and get the answer, or you wait till the next business day, or you wait till your sales rep wakes up in the morning, and you send him a text, Hey, I forgot how to do this.
You walk me through that real quick, yeah. That kind of thing. Make sure you get trained. Training is very important. Make sure you get trained on it. The staff is trained. Managers are trained. You understand the system, to use the system because when you know to use your point of sale system, that’s how, that’s when you can really get the most out of the point of sale system.
Run the loyalty program, use the time clock, do use all the things that can help you effectively run your business and save you money and build loyalty and get customers to come back. Integration. So integrations are very important at restaurants, even retail, the, if you’re a retailer, oh, can I link my shopping cart to the, how can I connect my, does my e-commerce and my retail talk to each other with inventory?
We’re working on a solution for that. Let’s say you use a bunch of delivery services in your restaurant, right? What Uber Eats d do. What are they called? That’s something in my eyes. Sorry. No, I’m saying like different things where you order your food. GrubHub, Uber Eats Postmate, Postmates, DoorDash, right?
DoorDash, so if you use a bunch, use those. What’s the integration look like? Let’s say you’re in a ho, you’re have a hotel. You have a hotel management system, now you want to change the, what you’re using in the restaurant, right? How does that integrate with your hotel system? What other and are there any other systems that you’re using that also integrate there?
Like your website? Yeah, like your website. So you want to make sure what’s the, all the integrations, mobility for ordering and pay at the table. Everybody’s expense experiencing staff shortages, right? So if your servers can take orders at the table, they can handle probably more tables.
More efficient. Yeah, be more efficient. Send, they don’t have to walk over to the station, punch everything in, they’re just doing it all at the table. Efficiency is very important. Customization now. Let’s say you go and you go get clover, or you go get one of these other out of the box solu, which comes, it just comes in a box.
Here you go. There’s not gonna be a lot of customization, right? So if you need customization, need to find out, hey, do you offer customization? Yes or no? We have a company that does offer some customization and they will do it access to the back end. How? How do you put in the. Back in, do you track your inventory?
How do you do that? You need to, you need to ask all the questions. We’ll post in the, on the podcast or we’ll do some social posts. We’ll post the list, we’ll post, yes, we’ll post the list of, what questions to ask. Your point of sale company, when you’re gonna buy a point of sale.
It’s not always about price, it’s about features, cost. All of these things come together. That way you get what you want, and a lot of times you get what you pay for, right? Yeah. That’s the oldest saying, Yeah. And the other thing is take what you pay for buddy. Yeah. And the other thing is you know, PE people are all worried about rates.
I look at one of the biggest point of sale newest players in the business is toast. They’re not so cheap on the credit card processing. You have to look at the overall picture of what you’re getting. The overall picture of what you’re getting and what you need.
Do I want hybrid? Do I want cloud? What do the devices look like? What does the warranty look like? And then, make your dec, make your decision based on that. Don’t worry too much about the credit card processing fees and all that while that, you want to get treated fairly.
But, you have to remember, you’re, you can’t get everything. You can’t get everything that you want. My, I had a friend of mine, he used to tell me, he go price. Value and service, right? You can’t, it’s like you can’t tell somebody like, oh yeah, I want the price from, I want the price from this system.
And then I want the features from this system, and then I want the service this company offers. You have to figure out like, You have to figure out which ones, which one’s gonna work for you, what’s gonna work for you. And a lot of times, businesses focus too much on the price.
And then they go and they go, I made a big mistake cuz I focused so much on price. I didn’t get what I want. Exactly. Feature wise. So I can imagine like all the people just starting a bus, they don’t know what they need either though, right? No, you have to think about it. What you need today.
You might say I don’t need a loyalty program right now. What if you want to add one on? Yeah. And most of those times, like the people selling them the stuff, they’re just selling you at a point of sale system. They don’t even care what your business does. They’re just trying to get you signed up.
Yeah. We try to, do an in-depth dive with you and see oh, gift cards. You’re gonna offer gift cards. Not right now. What about in the future? If the answer is yes, then you need to make sure the system thing is gonna do gift cards. Yes, you do. So you want to make sure what are the things that you want to do now?
What are you gonna do down the road? That’s why scalability is important. Oh, I’m gonna franchise my business, right? Okay. Is there franchise mode? How do I set up, how do, if you came to me and said franchise mode sound is like a. John Madden. That’s what I, yeah. If there’s a there’s a commercial now playoff mode, the basketball’s.
Oh, NBA live. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing is you want to make sure, can that system give you franchise mode if you need to have that down the road? Or how can you set up franchise mode? So you want to think about those things, cuz the last thing you want to do is make a whole big giant change. After you go put in a system and then you go.
Oh wow. I hate it. I don’t like it. This is a mistake. Oh, I don’t, we’re dealing with somebody now that has five restaurants. They’re all, the guy owns two of them. The other three are franchises. They didn’t think about what to do and now it’s a, now it’s a hot mess cuz the guy can’t, the guy owns the franchise, can’t see what the stores do.
Cuz it wasn’t set up correctly. They didn’t buy the right system. And the whole thing’s not set up right, so we’re making suggestions about what to do and how to do it. That’s just sad. But other ones, like we set up another franchise. We set up everything beautiful. They log into the reporting on the back end of the credit card processing, and they can see all the what’s going on.
They can log into the back end of the point of sale, and they can see everybody’s point of sale. All their sales and everything, so that’s cool. They know all their reporting is there. That’s what’s important with the point of sale. So that’s the point of sale Roundup. You wanna check us out on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok LinkedIn.
And please don’t forget to you subscribe to our YouTube channel At B2B Vault podcast. What were you gonna say? I was gonna say, if you want a consultation, we give free consultation. Go to the website, go to B2B vault.info, or hit us up on social. Say, Hey, I need to get a consultation and get a free consultation.
Follow a Alan Kopelman on Twitter myself at J R O W I N G S. Yeah, that’s a lot to follow. I’ll put it on the thing underneath us, like right here when I’m going like this. Yeah. Cool. Graphic. Cool. It’ll be like insert cool graphic here, and then it’ll be right here where my hands are. Yeah. All right. Yeah, we’re peace out carpe diem
