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Point of Sale System Solution with MagTek Card Reader

Clarity Payment Hub & MagTek Card Reader

The Point of Sale System & Payment Gateway Solution

 

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ADVANTAGES & LIMITATIONS OF POINT OF SALES SYSTEM

Point of Sale Systems are Necessary—and Limited

A lot of different store owners and businesses with physical locations may have temporary physical purchasing—for example, an exhibition hall that they travel to. Therefore, they need to be able to take advantage of a point of sales system, and they need it to talk to omnichannel API infrastructure. In most cases, this infrastructure is the eCommerce platform, ERP integration, or both. The business needs the ability to incorporate a point-of-sales system with the appropriate payment gateway.

A lot of our clients were unable to use MagTek and other card readers when using certain payment gateways, like PayTrace. PayTrace has a particular niche in the market, and they tend to provide a lot of cost savings for B2B sales. They enable a robust set of savings like upwards of half a percent or more in savings for transactions and reduction in fees, etc., by using their B2B payment gateway.

In order to use the payment gateway as the company that’s completing these transactions for customers, they have to be in a position where they can incorporate their point of sales systems with PayTrace, back-office system, and eCommerce or whatever other systems they need to tie it to. So if there’s a limitation there with the technology, they may not be able to finish the integration and will therefore be limited in what payment gateways they can use.

To use an analogy, it would be like saying a car only takes a certain type of gas. And because it can’t use these other types of gas, we can’t use less expensive gas. That makes it challenging because there are other, cheaper kinds of gas that are viable, but the car is not equipped to be able to use them.

 

CREATING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS

Extending Capabilities for Payment Gateways and Point of Sale Systems

Seeing this problem, we decided to make a payment hub, or payment portal, and point of sales system that allows an enterprise to address these needs. Specifically, to be able to leverage point of sales systems for standard on-site, on-premise, multi-location, temporary-location exhibition hall, in-person ticketing events, etc., but primarily for kiosk-purchase or cash-register purchase, in-store scenarios.

This point-of-sales system uses the MagTek SDKs (software development kits) to tie back into the payment hub that we created, which serves as a point-of-sale interface to the MagTek card reader. The MagTek offering includes a wide variety of different products, including the MagTek SCRA readers, DynaPro (and variations thereof for USB, Ethernet, and wireless), eDynamo, iDynamo, and uDynamo, among other offerings.

This system works really well because we are using the MagneFlex SDK and APIs to connect to the MagTek card readers. It’s a really robust offering for the end user because they can leverage the different mediums that they want—so they can use a physically secure card reader location, a mobile tablet or phone interaction to swipe cards, a sub-reader, Bluetooth reader—basically any medium that would make sense technology-wise, MagTek has probably implemented it.

This includes the latest security, technology, tokenization, and PCI DSS compliance capabilities. We are creating this marriage between this robust, physical hardware and these payment gateways that may not have a lot of technology support with the different vendors for these hardware platforms. We can also work with other payment cards, card readers, card swiping, payment card interfaces, etc., including credit and debit cards utility.

This capability changes the game for a lot of businesses because a lot of merchants are looking for vendors who can provide a solution that enables a point of sale that integrates to back-office systems and other omnichannel capabilities like eCommerce, ERP, CRP data, and processes payments through a particular payment gateway that may be unique.

Some of the problems that this solves is that this frees up our clients to rely on our point of sales systems to process these payments and allows them to take advantage of these significant cost savings while resting easy knowing they are using a robust piece of software like the MagTek card reader technology.

 

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Payment Hub Specifications and Procedures

We’re able to take advantage of the latest, greatest technology from the hardware side while getting to tie that to the latest and most cost-effective and optimal payment gateway for their business.

The way we do this is by going through a detailed process during the project, where we bring to bear a set of tools that we call our payment hub and point of sales system that we're incorporating. We conduct a discovery process that allows us to understand the complete cycle and sequence that makes sense for the business, the different scenarios that apply to the business, and how this needs to be integrated with possibly multi-location, multi-company, multi-system integrations.

They may have an ERP within each location. They may have a separate point-of-sales system that they just want to incorporate the card reader into, and we can help with that. They may want to incorporate their eCommerce and ERP system into this lightweight point of sales system, and we can do that too.

In some cases, the client will want to be able to use the wallet system and set up stored payment options for customers, so once they've swiped the info and brought it in, they can then store it and make it easier for the customer later if they want to use that same payment information. They could call in and place their order with that wallet with the stored information.

This might make it really nice if they are placing online orders. They've swiped their card in person and now they want to place an online order. So being able to tie those systems together is really nice for the end-user, so that we are streamlining the process of getting them from order intent to completed order.

The other thing that's really helpful about this MagTek integration is that MagTek card readers are not only secure but also well-recognized and credible as a customer and a trusted brand. This is going to help a lot of consumers with their confidence whenever they're making a purchase, or businesses who are processing the payment, using MagTek that's a well-recognized and credible name.

They do a lot to constantly improve and validate their security. Also within their solution, MagTek offers a nice security platform that's called Magensa.

 

SECURE USER INTERFACE

Magensa from MagTek

Magensa from MagTek includes this concept of a payment gateway within the card reader, so the actual card reader itself can go out and process payments to the payment gateway with a lot of standard gateways that are available, which is a really useful feature.

However, fundamentally, one of the things that is a strength of some of the different payment gateways is their cost structure, and not all those payment gateways are available with MagTek Magensa solution. It’s good to be aware of some of the options that they offer, and we’re happy to collaborate with clients and get them set up with those.

In some cases though, the solution isn’t available within their payment gateway on the MagTek device itself, so they offer a set of services that securely transfer the card information to the payment gateway using the point of sale system that we’ve created and we refer to as our Payment Hub.

That payment hub can then talk to dozens and dozens of different specialized payment gateways that are available, including the following:

  • Authorize.Net
  • BNG (BNG Payments; BNG Team)
  • BridgePay (BridgePayNetwork)
  • CardConnect
  • CyberSource
  • EVO Payments (& EVO Snap)
  • First Data
  • Heartland (Heartland Payments; Heartland Payroll Solutions)
  • Worldpay from FIS (formerly Worldpay, Inc., formerly Vantiv, formerly Litle & Co.)
  • Chase Paymentech Orbital
  • Payeezy
  • Payoneer
  • PayPal (PayPal Standard; PayPal Express; PayPal Payflow Pro)
  • PayTrace
  • Sage
  • Stripe
  • United TranzActions

This Magensa service offers different levels of completeness of the process that they handle within the MagTek card reader. So this can be complete A-to-Z, to the payment gateway, where the data is decrypted to be able to push us the payment information and then we take that and process the payment.

This can include tokenization, which is generally taking secure information, typically in this case payment card information, and then sending that to a tokenization service. The tokenization service, as the name implies, returns a token that's a random identifier that's going to represent the data in that tokenization platform, but it won't have any sensitive data by its nature. All we would get back as a token.

This is really helpful because if the card reader itself is essentially allowing us to do the tokenization, then that makes it really nice from a security perspective where the secure data is never getting beyond the card reader and/or the point of sales system.

This gives us the best of both worlds with this Magensa platform, where we can take advantage of built-in security protocols within the MagTek card reader and position the end customer, be it in a single location, a temporary location, or multiple locations, even hundreds of locations, they can take advantage of this point of sale system and the trusted name with MagTek, and their robust security and friendly user interface for card reading.

 

MagTek Card Reader and Clarity Payment Hub Implementation

 

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COMMON QUESTIONS

Implementation Timeline Factors

Some of the common questions that we get for this MagTek implementation with our payment hub and generally point of sale system, is: What timeline are we looking at typically to implement?

One of the things about MagTek that's really helpful is they have a very robust team that will work closely with other partners and with their customers. So once we establish the details of what types of services that your team wants to be turned on for the Magensa card reader, security, and any other aspects of the serial numbers and the versions of the card readers, it's usually a very quick process, within a week or two, to get all of this turned on, get the serial numbers programmed and sent, so that your team has access to the card readers.

And then fundamentally, once the card readers are available, the actual development process is relatively quick. If we are completing an ERP integration or we're completing any form of system integration, there's going to be some time for your team to collaborate with our team to complete a mapping document and gain access to those systems that we're integrating to.

We have a detailed onboarding that your team can access before the sales process is complete. So if your team is really wanting to move quickly, you can access our onboarding portal. It's an on-demand portal that your team can access and go through the onboarding process well in advance of formally kicking the project off.

But the process essentially involves getting in touch with MagTek, and we'll be happy to help you do this, in coordinating so that we can get the right devices, and get them programmed with the proper serial numbers, etc.

Now to you and your team, we typically recommend that we have a test device or test devices where appropriate and make sure that we can validate the entire process for you. Fundamentally, the MagTek portion of it is relatively quick.

The main thing that will dictate the timeline usually is going to be any integrations and any integration access that we might need. Usually, if you can get your team set up with access to the client onboarding portal that we make available, that's really going to help decrease the time required in order to complete the integrations themselves.

So this whole process can be a handful of weeks to possibly longer, just depending on how long it takes your team to get access to the integrations if you're doing those.

If you're just using the simple payment, point of sale system, the payment hub with MagTek integration, that's typically going to be a lot faster, so usually that is just a handful of weeks, but it really does depend on making decisions and gaining access to things versus there being a timeline constraint, usually, on implementing the software.

 

We hope that helps, and we certainly welcome the opportunity to collaborate with you and your team on your upcoming project. If you have a point-of-sale system that you're looking to integrate with MagTek card readers, or you want to leverage an existing point-of-sale system that can take advantage of MagTek card reader technology and a particular payment gateway, we have a great solution for that, and we certainly and look to tie that into our overall payment hub offering. It includes integration to literally hundreds of different ERPs, CRMs, and other line of business applications that you could really wrap up into a single package. So feel free to reach out to us to talk and get a free demo and no-obligation quote.

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