4 Ways POS Integration For Payments Can Benefit Retailers
An excellent payment solution is perhaps one of the primary pillars for running a successful retail business. Hence, it should be your top priority to find a solution that meets the needs of your customers and measures up to industry standards. If you want to adjust to the changing needs of customers and their payment options, you’ll find that you need POS integration with payment add-ons.
Sure, you can ring up sales with a standard POS system. However, the efficiency of your business can change if you find yourself the right payment solution. And this solution often involves POS integration with the relevant payment processors providers and respective facilitators. The possibilities of this option include such benefits as lower costs, streamlined reconciliations of accounts, and better reporting features.
Ultimately, you’ll succeed in getting more satisfied customers through these benefits. Over a period of time, you will see an increase in profits, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. Hence, this article covers POS integration related to payment processing, and it’s benefits for retailers.
POS integration for Payments
POS integration with other payment methods involves partnering with the platforms and systems that process payment of your business. Typically, this consists of making the necessary connections between the best point of sale system and the payment processors your business needs to serve customers.
As many businesses have admitted, POS integration with payment processors is necessary to enable the smooth flow of data between your business and several financial institutions responsible for validating payment transactions. The right integration eliminates entering customer credit card information manually every time customers get to the checkout counter – imagine the frustration and time wastage. Because an integrated POS has full access to the necessary information, the moment a payment is initiated at the EFTPOS terminal.
Reasons Why You Should Choose Integrated POS Payments
Upon first impressions, you may think the checkout counter out holds all the advantages for payment integrations. However, as we’ll see in this section, a POS system integration with several third-party payment processors and apps can result in significant gains for multiple areas of your business. Some of the popular benefits for such a POS integration include business intelligence, smarter customer service, and high-profit margins.
But don’t take our word for it.
Below are in-depth explanations of some of these benefits.
Retail Efficiency
Irrespective of which products you sell, chances are you don’t want to keep your customers in a long queue. The average retail shopper isn’t willing to wait for more than 5 to 10 minutes in a queue. Hence, if your queue and waiting time exceed this time limit, you could be losing significant amounts of sales due to customers who abandon sales.
With the right POS integration for payment processing, your POS solutions and the major payment processors have a better connection. Therefore, processing payment transactions becomes a matter of seconds, and checkout time reduces drastically. Usually, you can get such integrated POS solutions from cloud-based POS providers.
With the cloud-based tablet POS system, it’s easy for your employees to quickly, especially during peak hours. Thus, you can meet customer expectations and keep staff productivity high irrespective of the customer challenges your competitors may be facing.
Drastically Minimize Human Error
Many retailers may not be aware of this news, but there was an incident of an Australian work that received about A$500,000 in overpaid funds. According to the BBC report, “The worker was meant to get a salary of $4,921.76 but instead found A$492,176 ($360,700; £280,250) in their account.”
What could be the cause of this error? Someone misplaced the decimal point at just the right spot to pay this work a higher sum of money. Sure, it’s not every day you’ll read an error of this magnitude in the news. However, it shows the essence of POS integration in that; you can prevent such human mistakes from ever occurring.
Mind you, there have been other incidences where the simple typographical error while entering an account number led to significant loss of funds and unnecessary headaches. Believe it or not, you don’t want these in your business. Thus, the moment you connect your POS and your payment processors, the probability of such human errors occurring would have significantly reduced.
Besides minimizing such errors during checkout, POS integration for payment purposes can help to avoid lengthy end-of-day reconciliations entirely. These manual reconciliations are prone to mistakes. Hence, the POS system integration with payment processors helps avoid such errors too.
More Comprehensive Reports and Insights
Having your retail POS software and payment technologies working hand-in-hand makes it easier for you to collect, store, and process data about the purchase and payment transactions for your business. All your payment and sales data are then accessible at one location. When we compare these options with having to check data and create reports on different platforms, the differences and benefits became quite clear.
This kind of accessibility is a powerful tool for improving sales and marketing your products in the right way. Because you are in a better position to track cash flow, detect inefficiencies that affect your bottom line, and quickly detect credit card related frauds. With the right use of deductions made from payment reports, you can overcome employee errors and theft. Also, you can know the payment preferences of your customers. Hence, easily figuring out how to discount or sell your products and which products to promote.
In simple terms, the right POS integration results in the right payment reports enabling you to make forecasts and more informed decisions for your business.
Reduce Overall Costs
A more streamlined reconciliation and checkout process will fast-track massive savings both in terms of money and time. Also, you’ll find out that the majority of payment processors offer lower rates to merchants that choose to use preferred partners. Hence, you stand the chance of getting special rates that favor your bottom line and profit margins for a POS integration.
In essence, the possibilities are endless. Because many POS providers are always adding new features. Also, they add support for their integrations and add-ons. Also, we are gradually moving to a completely cashless society; as such, the best POS hardware the type of equipment that easily integrates with existing payment methods. The movement has already started with eCard readers for smartphones and tablet POS systems.
Therefore, a POS integration with payment processors is undoubtedly a move in the right direction.
Conclusion
You might want to put aside some cash to cover any extra expenses that integrated payments might attract. Nevertheless, as we mentioned earlier, you can get special rates when you integrate your POS software with payment processors. This single step could be the first step towards a more productive business. The package involves lower costs, higher customer retention, and overall customer satisfaction.
What are some of the benefits you derive from your integrated POS system? We’d like to know in the comment section below. If you have any questions about comparing POS systems or want to find out your options for third-party integrations and add-ons, don’t hesitate to follow our blog for more resources on this topic.
Here, the bottom line is that integrated POS payments can lead to tremendous benefits for your business. The key takeaways remain the fact that, you need a tight connection between your payment processors and POS system. Hence, you don’t already have one in place; you can consider a POS integration for your retail business. Remember, you might have to talk to either your POS provider or payment processor. To find out more about integrated POS payment options available.
