The Best Point of Sale (POS) and Payments Setup For Selling On The Move

Whether you’re operating a food truck, a pop up shop or selling at trade fairs, expos and conventions making sure you’re set up to sell smoothly is a critical step. Read on for the AirPOS Pay guide to simple, seamless selling wherever you may roam…

The essentials:

• A device to operate your point of sale software (iPads for us are by far the best choice)
• A card reader to take payments (the AirPOS Pay powered by Stripe bluetooth card reader)
• A ‘mifi’ device for internet connectivity (more to come below on why mifi is by far the best choice)
• A cash box for cash transactions (assuming you accept cash, many mobile sellers don't as it’s inconvenient to transport and expensive to bank these days)

Optional extras

• A receipt printer for physical receipts (requires plug in power)
• A cash drawer connected to your receipt printer (bulkier and heavier than a cash box where space is at a premium)
• A power brick to provide on demand recharging when needed

Why mifi?

First off let’s deal with your connectivity and the integration of your devices. Ideally you’ll have very very relaible internet connectivity that serves ALL the devices you want to connect as opposed to your iPad relaying on one wifi or sim, your card reader operating on another wifi or sim and any other devices such as phones etc onnecting via their own sims. The best way to ensure this on the move is what’s known as a mifi device, a small, inexpensive mobile router device that takes a sim card, connects to the internet and creates a secure, private wifi network for all of your devices that only you can use. A good mifi device with a 4G or 5G sim will typically produce speeds that are comparablke to your home broadband if not better in many cases. It’s really is like having broadband on the go.

Why is mifi connectivity better than the wifi that you can use as events? Simply because it’s uncontended. At any expo or convention for example you could have hundreds if not thousands of people pinging the same network at the same time rendering even the best open wifi networks unrelaible or unavailable. And tethering to your phones? That’s a great backup in case you have mifi issues but if you’ve ever tried it you know that’s it’s difficult to maintain, mostly due to the fact that people will wander off with their phones, use them for calls, to check emails or texts etc. You want a single device dedicated to the most critical task, making sure you have the connectivity to take payments!

Why iPads?

Quite simply because they have by far the best batteries of any mobile devices. They also do best with bluetooth devices such as card readers they’re honestly just better and from only £369 for a device that will last a number of years they are more than affordably priced.

Why are fully integrated card payments essential?

What do we mean by fully integrated card payments? Quite simple that the card reader and the POS device (in this case the AirPOS Pay Stripe card reader and an iPad) communicate the payments directly removing the need for the double entry of transactions and ensuring the accuracy of your sales without any room for error. How does this work?

• The operator enters the sale through the AirPOS app on the iPad
• They press ‘tender’ when they’re ready to complete the sale
• The amount owed is communicated to the card reader
• The customer pays with their card, phone or watch
• The payment completes, the POS software is informed and the inventory sold is removed from the system

Foolproof, just what you need when you’re busy which of course we hope you are!

Wait! No receipts?

That’s right, we said that a receipt printer and cash drawer are optional extras so how do you make sure you give your customers, and especially the business customers, a receipt? Simple! Email receipts are now very common with many people actually preferring an email receipt they can later easily find in their inbox rather than yet another piece of paper they have to keep which will inevitably get lost! And as a bonus you can ask if for the customers permission to add them to your marketing list also, a win / win as you’ll be able to contact a lot of them later to encorage repeat business the holy grail of any business.

Okay what’s all of this going to cost me?

Getting Started

Of course minimising the hardware required minimises your up front costs. With AirPOS Pay also you’ll get your first card reader for free so the costs are effectively the costs of an iPad and a cash box, around £400 all told. Not bad for a system that would have cost £5000 not too many years ago and required an external power setup to run it!

Ongoing Costs

At AirPOS Pay we don’t enforce any ongoing costs other than a small transaction fee, typically around 1.75% in the case of mobile operators, which means you only pay us when you’re selling. No monthly subscription, no terminal rentals or PCI fees or any of that old nonsense!

To get setup with a mobile setup contact our sales team at sales@airpos.co.uk or call us on ‪028 3870 8969‬