VAR Upgrades Frozen Dessert Shop's Payment Processing System

Ted Drewes Frozen Custard has been serving original desserts in St. Louis for over 77 years. The retailer recently was experiencing an increase in sales, which resulted in cashiers getting backed up attempting to process credit cards via a shared dial-up processing terminal. In addition, the retailer was experiencing troubles with its gift certificate program. More specifically, the retailer manually tracked issued gift certificates using a paper-based record. That is, employees would keep a running total on a piece of paper of how much credit was used and what was left on a gift certificate. Aside from being inefficient and prone to human error, the paper certificates were being counterfeited due to advances in scanning and printing technologies. Finally, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard also was experiencing troubles with its existing cash registers.

To solve its problem, the retailer called VAR Interstate Business Systems (IBS). The VAR installed eight Toshiba TEC FS-2700 keyboard terminals for each of the cashier windows and configured them all to use Mercury Payment Systems' Web-based payment processing service. The Mercury product includes the ability to process gift certificates, access real-time Web-based reporting, and perform automatic cross-store reconciliation to Ted Drewes' other frozen custard shop. Additionally, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard began processing gift cards through Mercury's gift card platform, MercuryGift. MercuryGift enabled the retailer to replace paper gift certificates with plastic mag-stripe-based gift cards.

Today, the issuing and redeeming of gift cards is a streamlined process that customers have reported to prefer. In fact, since adopting the gift cards, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard has seen a 30% increase in the number of card purchases compared to previous year sales of gift certificates. In addition, the gift cards have eliminated both human mistakes and the fraud associated with the prior manual system.