Back-up Hardware
March 31, 2009 by Matthew Hunt
Many Merchants today don’t have a manual credit card imprinter kicking around and that is not a good thing. Every Merchant should always have one those out-of-date “Knuckle Busters” handy with some carbon copy credit card slips.
The reason being is if your POS system is down you can quickly do a manual swipe on your customers credit card and let them proceed through the check-out without any hiccups. Doing this will enable you to still capture the card present rates and help protect you against potential chargebacks.
Now be sure to have your staff trained on these procedures of how to use this older equipment because I was a Winners the other day and their debit machine when down and the staff didn’t know how to manually process credit cards. I asked them to do it this way so I could be on my way. They said at this time they could only accept cash. I had 2 pairs of jeans in my hand and decided to leave even though a bank machine was two floors down.
I was not the only customer that did this. And most people would just leave.
If they had been trained right on the back-up procedures of how to process a credit card through a manual imprinter then they would made an additional $150 worth sales from me. Now I am sure that is hardly a blip on the sales volume of a Winners, but multiply that by how many times the POS system goes down in a year by lets say 10-15 customers by 100’s of locations and we are talking 100’s of thousands of dollars a year in missed sales all because staff was not trained correctly on how to process credit cards manually.
Technology is great, but only when its working. You can buy an inexpensive credit card swiper here.
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