At this point, if you have a business, however small, it is essential that you have enabled a point-of-sale terminal. Without it, you would be doomed to accept only cash payments from people who physically come to buy at your shop. You would be giving up all the income you could get from consumers who prefer to use their card (which increasingly account for a larger amount of customers, and more so now that, with the coronavirus pandemic, we tend to limit physical contact with objects such as coins or banknotes as much as possible, since they are potential carriers of the infection) and any other alternative methods to those used in the last century. Of course, running a better online shop is out of the question.Point-of-sale terminals are more commonly known by their acronym POS, which comes from “point of sale”. The most common concept is that we are talking about the devices used to read the credit or debit card with which a customer pays. But strictly speaking this machine is called a “dataphone” and is just a piece of the POS. 

The complete point-of-sale system is, nowadays, a practically essential tool to ensure the viability of a business. Hence it is very convenient to implement a reliable and efficient POS structure, such as PayXpert’s virtual POS. But let’s take a closer look at the benefits this technology can bring us. 

 

Why we need a good POS

A POS goes far beyond the old cash registers and is not just a way to make payments easier for customers. Today it provides a much broader range of services. A comprehensive revenue management system for a business can also handle more tasks, such as:

  • The booking of sessions for our service on the date and time chosen.
  • Checking the availability of products in stock (and, if necessary, requesting replacements from the corresponding suppliers).
  • The automation of product shipments to the buyers’ homes.
  • The organization of tips, if the nature of the business requires it (e.g. in the hospitality industry).
  • And many other options, depending on the characteristics of your business.

Faced with so many functions that it has to perform, a POS must be effective and efficient to solve them with guarantees. Not only does its hardware have to be resistant enough to withstand daily use, but its software must have an optimal design to make it stable, because a fall at the most inopportune moment can make us lose a sale. And it also has to work with the right fluidity to avoid unnecessary and uncomfortable waits for the customer.

 

Virtual POS or mobile POS: the ideal POS to complement ecommerce

Although in Spain online payment gateways are often called virtual POS, an interesting option if your business has an online presence is to establish a virtual or mobile POS, i.e. a specific point of sale for online shops that can give you some presence in the physical world. In fact, if your commerce is only online and lacks a physical location where it can develop its activity (a reality that is becoming increasingly common in contemporary society) this tool becomes a very interesting additional sales channel to explore – for example – with local businesses, or sales with local sales teams. 

Strictly speaking, a virtual POS is an online payment system that allows online shops to accept payment from their customers, while the mobile POS would be a software that can be implemented on any smart device running Android or iOS; both of which are compatible with the business’s catalogue of offers, so that it can take care of the entire sales process from the moment customers choose which product or service they want to purchase until the shopping cart is processed and the shipping order has been given to send it to their home or the place they have indicated.

 

Bearing this in mind, an important feature of this type of POS is that its code is versatile enough to adapt to the specific needs of each shop, for example with regard to the type of payment methods it accepts (VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, cryptocurrencies, or the many alternatives offered by the market today). Likewise, it must be reliable to withstand without collapsing a great flood of consumers that could be generated at specific times and on specific dates.

 

In this sense, the PayXpert payment gateway is an optimal solution for online sales. The system guarantees absolute integration with the most common web building platforms, such as Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart or WordPress, among many others. It also supports the most common technologies used abroad, such as AliPay and WeChat Pay (Chinese) or the Russian MIR. You will not lose a single sale no matter how exotic your customer may seem!

 

Phos and PayXpress software: turn your phone into a portable point of sale

Another interesting alternative for some shops is the possibility of always carrying the point of sale, something unimaginable a short time ago without prohibitive logistical costs for small businesses, but perfectly possible with current technology. Wherever you are, you will be able to charge your customers, and it will even allow you to adopt one more payment method that is to the liking of some consumers: payment at the moment the delivery man delivers the purchase, and not in advance.

 

The solution that PayXpert has developed consists of transforming any Android phone into a point of sale with advanced value-added features with PayXpress, and any Android or iOS phone that has NFC into a contactless POS through the Phos app. It will no longer be necessary to load with the dataphone, but we will be able to configure our mobile to process collections in any currency. We will be able to read via contactless all the credit or debit cards that support this technology, which are most of the ones currently issued by banks, and by scanning QR codes with the camera you can also access services such as WeChat Pay or AliPay.

 

These are just some of the ways PayXpert’s software is innovating in POS. Our team keeps innovating to always offer you the options best suited to the requirements of your business, whether it is a physical or a virtual shop or if it works in both worlds. Don’t forget to visit our website and follow our blog to know all the new features we are developing!