In the run-up to peak trading season, retailers are thinking: in, over and out. How can they get customers in-store, sales over the counter and merchandise out?
Also, how can they do this as quickly and efficiently as possible for staff and customers?

There are many moving parts to a successful retail business. In this blog, we’ll focus on the payment acceptance part, especially terminals and how to get the best out of them.

MOBILE POINT OF SALE

mPOS is a mobile phone or tablet that acts as an electronic till (or point of sale) system alongside a card payment device. It’s great for queue-busting at busy times — lunchtimes, evenings and weekends during peak season.

Because mPOS is portable, staff can serve customers wherever they are in store. This helps convert browsers into buyers, which boosts revenue. It also improves the customer experience with speedier service and fewer lost sales.

With mPOS, stores have the flexibility to deploy staff more efficiently as and when they are needed with no sacrifice of retail space. Similarly, with no wires or cables, mPOS uses floorspace efficiently. That’s a boon at this time of year, when you want to devote space to displaying merchandise not processing payments.

If you’re operating pop-up stores, concessions or trading outside your main store environment at this time of year, mPOS will also help you get up and running with card acceptance quickly.

Integration with ANYpay: At PXP, we believe that mPOS complements an in-store POS. So, we’ve made our mPOS solution compatible with your existing integration to ANYpay POS. Just ensure that your mPOS sales app can send a request to the static POS software already integrated with ANYpay POS.

If you’re running the latest version of ANYpay POS, mPOS in-store can be rolled out in a single API integration. This is deployed remotely for maximum speed and convenience. All the configuration is done on the back-end.

ADDITIONAL FIXED POINT OF SALE

You may have seven registers in-store, only five of which are ever used for the majority of the year. Powering up additional fixed registers is a great way to cut queues and serve customers faster.

I’d advise planning this a little way in advance just to ensure that the terminals and PIN entry devices (PEDs) are working when you need them to. We get a lot of enquiries from customers who have fired up an extra POS that’s not been used in a while. The PED may not work and they want to test it.

We can also see from the monitoring system on our end when a customer has added a new POS, and whether it’s using the most up-to-date software.

Integration with ANYpay: Provisioning new or dormant terminals is easier and more secure than it’s ever been. The latest software can normally be deployed remotely without an engineer’s visit. For example, we rolled out our ANYpay solution to a retail customer with 800 stores within a fortnight at the touch of a button.

It’s the same with the security elements. If you run our point-to-point encryption application on the PEDs, this can be deployed by remote key injection.

I’d recommend that you plan for additional terminals in advance though, mostly to allow comfort testing and staff training.

PXP Financial

The End-to-end payment platform

Whatever your business needs today or tomorrow, PXP Financial’s innovative payment platform will support your business growth with all the payment services you will ever need from one source, wherever your business takes you.