Developer Helps Restaurant Gain Credit Card Efficiency
This POS (point of sale) software developer is experiencing 30% growth
by combining credit card processing with its custom software.
At the point of sale, a credit card can’t be processed fast enough to make customers happy. But, in the SMB hospitality market, many customers do not have the financial resources to invest in high-priced POS software to make credit card processing as efficient as it should be. That’s where Point Of Success can help. In addition to providing its proprietary POS software, the company also has integrated credit card processing services from Mercury Payment Systems into its POS software.
Point Of Success is a restaurant POS software developer with 8 employees and 75 independent dealers throughout North America. This year, Point Of Success expects to increase POS software sales by 30%. Jeff Ward, the CEO of Point Of Success, plans to do this by offering what he calls high-value, low-priced software to SMB hospitality customers.
It gets a little confusing with software developers in this type of situation. On one hand, they are a vendor; on another, they are a VAR; and on yet another, they are an integrator. Ward says, “We are not a VAR for our software product — we are a developer. Our 75 dealers are the VARs for our product. They add value to our product by providing installation, configuration, training, and support. We are a VAR and an integrator for Mercury Payment Systems. Mercury compensates us to integrate their software with ours, and we benefit by the additional value their software adds to ours.” Point Of Success dealers benefit because there is a revenue-sharing model with Mercury Payment Systems. Dealers are compensated on a per-transaction basis.
Increase Customer Satisfaction With Credit Card Payment Processing
The primary focus of Point Of Success is the SMB hospitality customer. A recent example of this type of customer is Panhandler’s Pizza in Fort Collins, CO. Prior to the Mercury Payment Systems integration with Point Of Success, Panhandler’s was using two dial-up credit card terminals, shared among four POS stations. Credit card processing could only be done at the shared dial-up terminals and took 15 to 20 seconds to get an approval. This was inefficient and required the restaurant to have a separate phone line for each terminal. As the restaurant grew, it upgraded to the latest version of Point Of Success, which included the Mercury Payment Systems credit card processing capabilities. Now credit card payments can be processed at every POS station, and processing takes only two seconds. The improved efficiencies are obvious, according to the manager of Panhandler’s — time savings and increased customer satisfaction.
Developers and integrators may be interested to know Mercury Payment Systems specializes in integrated payment processing solutions that are embedded, for free, into a variety of point of sale and electronic cash register systems. The company offers a two-second IP (Internet Protocol) and a dial-up platform. Both products include free, value-added services, such as gift card processing, 24/7 technical support, and real-time Web reports to assist merchants in managing their businesses. Ward says it was easy to integrate Mercury’s software into its Point Of Success software.
“We promote low price with our software,” says Ward. “We get the customer’s attention with the price, but then we win them over when they see the features such as credit card processing in our software at that low price.” Point Of Success has been offering credit card processing for only five months and is already seeing a significant positive effect on sales.