NTC’s Mobile Credit Card Processing Device

Several options exist for mobile credit card processing.

Credit card processing on iPhone/ipad/Android/BlackBerry or Tablets – Using NTC’s portable credit card readers, merchants can now swipe credit cards on iPad or Android tablet devices. NTC’s Virtual Merchant solution allows users to download a secure application to interfere your smartphone with our merchant account services seamlessly. The application and credit card processing data on the carriers network or a WiFi connection to the internet.

NTC’s MagTek Bullet Swipe Credit Card Reader for Android Phones and Tablets.

Using any Android 2.2. or higher device you can process credit card transactions securely to the smartphone via Bluetooth and utilize wireless devices internet connection (WiFi or Carrier) to send the credit card processing data encrypted for processing approval.

Security anywhere. With the BulleT Secure Credit Card Reader Authenticator (SCRA), security comes with the flexibility and portability of a Bluetooth wireless interface. Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, the BulleT enables secure wireless communications with a PC or mobile phone using the popular Bluetooth interface. Not only does the BulleT encrypt card data from the moment the card is swiped, but it also enables card authentication to immediately detect counterfeit or altered cards.

Ideal for merchant services accounts and financial institutions’’ mobile credit card processing, NTC’s BulleT offers MagnaSafe credit card processing security features with the convenience of a Bluetooth interface. This powerful combination assures credit card data protection, transaction security and convenience needed to secure mobile credit card processing with strong encryption and 2-factor authentication. The BulleT is specifically designed to leverage the existing magnetic stripe credit card reader as a secure token empowering cardholders with the freedom and confidence of knowing that their credit card transactions are secure and protected anytime, anywhere. Android Credit Card Swipe Reader for Android Phones and Tablets on your wireless mobile merchant account.

 

NTC’s MagTek iDynamo Credit Card processing swipe reader for iPhone and Ipad.

Credit card processing on an iPhone has never been easier. Simply attach NTC’s  iDynamo card reader to your iPhone or iPad device, install our Virtual Merchant software from the App Store and you’re ready to go. Take advantage of lower credit card processing rates by processing swiped transactions instead of  keying the credit card in later and get paid faster. From the company that leads with Security from the Inside MagTek has done it again with the iDynamo, a secure card reader authenticator (SCRA) designed to work with the iPhone and iPad. The iDynamo offers MagnasafeTM security and delivers open standards encryptions with simple, yet proven DUKPT key management, immediate tokenization of card data and MagnePrint card authentication to maximize data protection and prevent the use of counterfeit cards. Mobile merchants can now leverage the power of their iPhone/iPod Touch products without the worries of handling or storing sensitive card data at any time. Ideal for wireless mobile merchant accounts and mobile credit card processing, the iDynamo offers MagneSafe security features combined with the power of iPhone and iPod Touch products. This powerful combination assures convenience and cost savings, while maximizing credit card data protection and credit card transaction security from the moment the card is swiped all the way to authorization. No other credit card reader beats the protection offered by a MagnaSafe product.

Other credit card devices claim to encrypt data in the reader. NTC’s iDynamo encrypts the data inside the read head, closest to the magnetic stripe and offers additional credit card security layers with immediate tokenization of card data and MagnePrint card authentication. This layered approach to security far exceeds the protection of encryption by itself, decreases the scope of PCI compliance, and reduces fraud.

NTC’s  iDynamo is rugged and affordable, so it not only withstands real world use, it performs to the high standards set by MagTek as the leader in magnetic credit card swipe reading products for nearly 40 years.

Posted in Credit card Processing, Credit Card Reader Terminal, Credit Card Security, Digital Wallet Privacy, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Merchant Services Account, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Payment Card Industry PCI Security, Smartphone Tagged with: Android, android phones and tablets, authenticator, blackberry, bluetooth, card authentication, credit card processing data, devices, encrypt card data, encrypted, internet, ipad, Iphone, magnetic stripe, magtek bullet, merchant account, merchant services accounts, Merchant's, mobile credit card processing, portable credit card readers, process credit card transactions, processing approval, secure, secure application, secure token, smartphone, swipe credit card reader, swipe credit cards, tablets, transaction security, virtual merchant, wifi, wireless devices internet connection

16 Free Online Tools for Small Businesses

16 Free Online Tools for Small Businesses

Whether you’re starting a small business or you’re just thrifty, you can likely benefit from some free online productivity tools.

There are apps for accounting, collaboration, customer management, development, scheduling, general office tasks and more. All of these tools have free plans, and several are entirely free.

Appointlet

If you make appointments with customers, you may need Appointlet, an online appointment-scheduling app for Google Calendar. Add it to your website and let your clients do the booking. Confirm, decline, cancel, or reschedule any appointment right from the comfort of your Google Calendar. Easily gather all the information from your clients that you need to fulfill the appointment.

Boomerang for Gmail

Lets you write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Write the message as you normally would, then click the Send Later button. Tell Boomerang when to send your message by using the calendar chooser or the text box that understands language like “next Monday.

Dropbox

Is a cloud-storage service that lets you access and sync files across all your devices. While Dropbox only offers 2 GB of initial free storage (Google Drive and SkyDrive offer more), it expands free storage up to 16 GB free for referrals. Dropbox offers native support for Linux and Blackberry, as well as Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Android. To supercharge your Dropbox, utilize the many third-party apps, which offer enhanced file syncing with Dropbox’s new Datastore API.  

Evernote

Is an app to remember everything, from lifelong memories and vital information to daily reminders and to-do lists. Everything you store in your Evernote account is automatically synced across all of your devices, making it easy to capture, browse, search, and edit your notes everywhere you have Evernote.

Gmail

Is a Google’s email application, which includes 15 GB of free storage (across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ photos). Gmail also lets you communicate via SMS, voice, or video chat. See who’s online and connect instantly. See your contacts’ profile photos, recent updates, and shared docs next to each email.

Google+ Hangouts

Turn any gathering into a live video call with up to ten friends or simply call a contact to start a voice call from your computer. Enhance your call with Cacoo for online drawing, SlideShare for sharing presentations, and Conceptboard for whiteboard collaboration. 

HelloSign

Is an application for getting documents signed. It includes tools to facilitate document signing, tracking and management. Notifications keep you appraised of the signer’s activity. Signed documents are securely stored and always accessible. Sign an unlimited number of documents for free. HelloSign has mobile apps and a Gmail extension.

HootSuite

Is a social media dashboard to manage and measure you social networks. Manage your messages, get custom analytics on your social campaigns, and communicate internally without leaving the HootSuite dashboard. Access a single interface to monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages, WordPress and more. Or add more social networks with the HootSuite App Directory.

KeePass

Is a free password manager to help manage your passwords in a secure way. Put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. Remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using secure encryption algorithms (AES and Twofish).

Mural.ly

Is a visual-collaboration whiteboard app. Drag and drop images, links, and documents to organize your ideas. This simple visual tool can keep your team in sync through brainstorming, planning, or designing a project. Features include private murals, auto-save and backups, comments, activity feed, and chat.

NutshellMail

Takes copies of your latest updates in your social networking accounts and places them in a snapshot email. The NutshellMail update is then sent to your primary email address. NutshellMail supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, MySpace, YouTube, Foursquare, and Citysearch. Receive updates as often as you wish.

Rapportive

Shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. Immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. Establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. Record thoughts and leave notes for later.

Streak

Is a customer relationship application for Gmail. Track your deals from your inbox. Group emails from the same customers together, utilizing spreadsheet view right inside Gmail. Use the mobile app to keep track of your customers, make calls, and send emails. Share selective parts of your inbox. Schedule emails to send later.

Trello

Is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to create projects and develop your workflow.

Wave

Offers online accounting and finance applications for small businesses. It includes invoicing, accounting, payroll, payments, receipts, and personal finance software. Accounting, invoicing, receipts, and personal finance applications are free.

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Merchant Account Services News Articles, nationaltransaction.com Tagged with: accounting, Android, appointlet, apps, automatically, boomerang, developer, dropbox, email, evernote, Facebook, free, gmail, google, hangouts, hellosign, hootsuite, iOS, keepass, linkedin, mac os, mural.ly, nutshellmail, online, passwords, scheduling, skydrive, small businesses, streak, sync, syncing, tools, trello, twitter, wave, windows, wordpress

List of tools and services to help small business owners accept credit cards…whether online or in person.

1. Account Updater (Visa)

Incorrect billing information leads to declined credit cards, loss of sales and unhappy customers.

Visa touts its Account Updater as an easier way to keep customer data current. The tool appends all card data with up-to-date customer info so businesses can avoid difficulties over address changes, name changes, expired cards and more.

The tool can benefit any business that bills customers on a recurring basis.

It eliminates the need for manual administration, so it can lower your business’s operational costs and customer-service expenses. And by saving your clients the hassle of a declined payment, you can boost customer satisfaction and overall sales.

2. Netswipe

Paying online is convenient for customers, but keying in an unwieldy credit card number is still a pain.

Netswipe from Jumio gives customers an easier way: The tool lets users pay by snapping a photo of their credit card; it’s almost as easy as swiping your card through a traditional card reader.

According to Jumio, customers can use their smartphone or tablet to scan a card in as little as 5 seconds, whereas traditional key entry takes 60 seconds or more, on average. Having a quick and convenient way to pay could help contribute to a positive buying experience and encourage repeat business.

The system is compatible with any iOS or Android mobile device, as well as with any computer with a webcam.

3. Netverify

Jumio’s fraud-scrubbing tool helps you determine if your customers are who they say they are.

Net verify allows customers to snap a picture of their driver’s license or other identification using a smartphone, tablet or PC webcam. Once the image is taken, the tool can verify the authenticity of the documentation in as little as 60 seconds.

That’s much faster and more convenient than asking a customer to fax or mail a copy of their ID in the middle of a transaction.

The tool can verify identifying documents from more than 60 countries…including passports, ID cards and driver’s licenses, and even bank statements and utility bills. Jumio says its software is smart enough to automatically reject nonauthentic documents.

And customers can rest easy knowing that all submitted information is protected with 256-bit encryption to prevent identity theft.

Online merchants embed Netverify into their websites as part of the checkout process.

4. Payment Gateway

Payment Gateway service does all the heavy lifting of routing and managing credit card transactions online.

Portals like this one benefit small businesses by providing a fast and secure transmission of credit card data between your website and the major payment networks. It works a lot like a traditional credit card reader, but uses the Internet to process transactions instead of a phone line.

Payment Gateway also offers built-in fraud-prevention tools and supports a range of payment options, including all major credit cards and debit cards.

5. PayPal Here

Mobile credit card processing services like PayPal Here  make it easy to accept credit cards in person using a smartphone or tablet.

PayPal Here and other similar services send you a dongle that attaches directly to your iPhone, iPad or Android device, allowing you to swipe physical credit cards wherever you are.

One major benefit of mobile credit card readers is that they work with the devices you already own. That means there’s no need to carry around additional hardware, aside from the reader add-on itself. Most credit card readers attach to your device via the headphone jack or charger port, and are small enough to fit in your pocket.

The smallest businesses have the most to gain by opting for mobile credit card readers, which are cheaper and far more portable than traditional options.

6. Virtual Terminal

If you do business online, your website needs the infrastructure to accept credit card information.

Web-based applications like virtual terminal offer the basic processing functionality of a physical point-of-sale system, and are easy to install on your business’s website.

The system allows merchants to collect orders straight from the Web, or take orders via phone or mail and before initiating card authorizations online.

It also includes extensive transaction history to help you manage payment data, split shipments, back orders and reversals. Business owners can even receive a daily email report of all credit card transaction activity from the prior day.

 

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Reader Terminal, Credit Card Security, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Gift & Loyalty Card Processing, Mail Order Telephone Order, Merchant Cash Advance, Merchant Services Account, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Near Field Communication, Point of Sale, Smartphone, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account, Android, authenticity, card data, card reader, checkout, checkout process, credit card number, credit card transactions, debit cards, declined payment, expired, fraud, id, iOS, mail, mobile device, nonauthentic, online, online merchants, passports, payment data, payment gateway, payment options, phone, point of sale, recurring, smartphone, tablet, verify, visa, webcam

Host-based Card Emulation

Android 4.4 introduces an additional method of card emulation that does not involve a secure element, called host-based card emulation. This allows any Android application to emulate a card and talk directly to the NFC reader. This document describes how host-based card emulation (HCE) works on Android and how you can develop an app that emulates an NFC card using this technique.

Many Android-powered devices that offer NFC functionality already support NFC card emulation. In most cases, the card is emulated by a separate chip in the device, called a secure element. Many SIM cards provided by wireless carriers also contain a secure element.

Card Emulation with a Secure Element

The secure element itself performs the communication with the NFC terminal, and no Android application is involved in the transaction at all. After the transaction is complete, an Android application can query the secure element directly for the transaction status and notify the user.

When NFC card emulation is provided using a secure element, the card to be emulated is provisioned into the secure element on the device through an Android application. Then, when the user holds the device over an NFC terminal, the NFC controller in the device routes all data from the reader directly to the secure element.

Host-based Card Emulation

The NFC standards offer support for many different protocols, and there are different types of cards that can be emulated. When an NFC card is emulated using host-based card emulation, the data is routed to the host CPU on which Android applications are running directly, instead of routing the NFC protocol frames to a secure element.

Android 4.4 supports several protocols that are common in the market today. Many existing contactless cards are already based on these protocols, such as contactless payment cards. These protocols are also supported by many NFC readers in the market today, including Android NFC devices functioning as readers themselves. This allows you to build and deploy an end-to-end NFC solution around HCE using only Android-powered devices.

Posted in Electronic Payments, Mobile Payments, Near Field Communication, Smartphone Tagged with: 4.4, Android, app, card, cards, communication, contactless, controller, cpu, data, emulation, HCE, host, nfc, notify, payments, protocols, query, reader, routes, secure element, sim, status, terminal

Credit Card Purchases will give way to Tap and Go

With banks and shops starting to let customers pay by tapping their smart phones on terminals in stores, the future of plastic credit cards is looking shaky.

MasterCard, which has teamed with Coles and CommBank on these ventures, yesterday said Australians were rapidly embracing contactless payments using PayPass and rival Visa’s payWave. At Coles, six out of 10 MasterCard and Visa payments were contactless.

MasterCard head of market development and innovation for Australasia said three out of 10 MasterCard terminal payments were contactless and there were now more than 175,000 terminals nationwide that could accept them. More than 10 million MasterCards in Australia could make contactless payments.

An EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) standard meant all terminals were capable of handling different brands of contactless payments.

The first stage of the contactless payments or “tap and go” revolution began with Visa payWave and MasterCard PayPass in Australia and the first institution to make contactless payments available locally was the Commonwealth Bank in 2006.

The next stage is to use smartphones rather than just plastic cards for contactless payments. Customers still use their Visa and MasterCard accounts, but the transaction is effected using a Near Field Communication sticker placed on the back of the phone, or an embedded, secure NFC element inside modern Android smartphones.

In Europe, NFC-enabled watches, wristbands, key rings and fobs also were being used for contactless payments and there was no reason this couldn’t happen here.

Visa said it had made a “significant investment” in a mobile NFC ecosystem.

“Visa is working closely with partners like Samsung, Vodafone and Optus on a range of mobile payment solutions that use the secure element and prepaid SIM models.”

CommBank, which previously enabled contactless payments from an iPhone housed in a special case, last week said it would let customers pay directly from their Apple phone using an NFC sticker, and from newer Android phones with embedded secure NFC technology.

The new facility, to be rolled out in the current financial year, is part of a revamp of the bank’s smartphones apps.

Coles said contactless payments had increased in the past year by more than 70 per cent while CommBank’s volume of contactless payments had increased six fold in 12 months. Westpac said it was piloting an Android mobile contactless payment application and was also investigating smartwatch payments.

“We also believe that the next big trend after the rise of mobiles and NFC in Australia will be mobile checkouts, where shoppers purchase products and have them delivered within two or three clicks,” a spokeswoman said, and the moves were “as big a market shift as we’ve ever seen”.

Coles also announced a trial of its own contactless payments technology using NFC stickers. Funds would be drawn from Coles Rewards MasterCards. Some 5000 mobile phone tags would be issued in a trial.

ANZ said it was continuing its trial of a mobile wallet for Android phones begun last year, ahead of making the solution available to customers.

“Our NFC pilot with Samsung and Optus is tracking well and we’re also investigating other payment options such as QR codes,” an ANZ spokesman said.

“Given the fragmentation of the market, we will continue to monitor developments before finalising how we will bring a viable mobile wallet solution for our customers to market.”

St George Bank chief information officer said his bank planned to have a contactless phone payments solution in the market “sometime in 2014”.

The bank has previously been reported to be looking at payments via the Pebble and Samsung smart watches.

National Australia Bank, which unveiled its peer-to-peer payments app, NAB Flik, last month, said it was watching how the contactless payments market developed with “less focus on being first to market and more focus on being best in market.”

The Australian  reported last month that Apple and PayPal were exploring an alternative to NFC-enabled contactless payments called iBeacons. When you pass close to a store in a shopping centre, a beacon will detect your phone’s presence and automatically alert you to signature items for sale and specials, or offer other information to lure you inside, and process payments.

CommBank last week told The Australian it was looking at iBeacons technology.

Posted in Credit card Processing, Electronic Payments, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Near Field Communication, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: accounts, Android, banks, checkouts, contactless, embedded, EMV, EuroPay, fobs, Iphone, MasterCard, mobile, mobile wallet, Near Field Communication, nfc, optus, payments, paypass, paywave, phone, plastic credit cards, prepaid, process payments, qr codes, Samsung, secure, shops, sim, smart phones, Smartphones, smartwatch, sticker, store's, Tags, tap and go, tapping, terminal, terminals, transaction, visa's, vodafone

Understanding Ecommerce Shoppers

The best place to start understanding your customer is to put yourself into every step of a buying cycle and analyze what influences various purchase decisions.

Who is your customer?

Basic demographics and usually includes the following: 

Age range                                                                                                                                            Education level                                                                                                                                        Gender                                                                                                                                                   Income level                                                                                                                                            Location                                                                                                                                                 Marital status                                                                                                                                          Profession

Many of these basic demographics can be inferred from your interactions with customers. In many cases, you can simply ask them.

Beyond the basics, you will also benefit from more personal data, such as the following:

Interests                                                                                                                                                 Activities                                                                                                                                                 Political affiliation

That data is harder to access, but there are databases that will allow you to target individuals based on those criteria. Facebook’s ad platform provides an incredible amount of targeting data. You can infer your customer profiles by the types of results you get by running ads aimed at specific target markets. That will help identify the interests of your customers.

What? consider what consumers need to know about a product to make a purchase.

Are there ongoing costs?                                                                                                                                Does it need anything else to make it work?                                                                                      How big is it?                                                                                                                                           How does it function?                                                                                                                               How long will it last?                                                                                                                                How much does it cost?                                                                                                                           Is there a warranty?                                                                                                                                 What are its specs?                                                                                                                                 What does it look like?                                                                                                                             What options are there?                                                                                                                           What sizes and colors are available?

To find those details, shoppers will seek different sources: articles, websites, blogs, and actually looking at products and trying them on. Make sure you understand the “what” questions for your products. Then, provide answers to those questions.

Why? The “why” questions are important. Do you know why your customers buy your products?

It could be for the following reasons.

Address an immediate need or desire.                                                                                                        Loyal to a particular brand or store.                                                                                                                Need flexibility to return products.                                                                                                            Need product occasionally or on a regular schedule.                                                                                  Purchase because product is cool or trendy.                                                                                                Seek bargains.                                                                                                                                              Seek high-quality products                                                                                                                        Seek little or no shipping or sales tax.                                                                                                    Seek the lowest price possible.                                                                                                                Shop around every time they buy.

Answers will surely vary. Consider also, what motivates your customers to purchase the products you sell and also why they purchase them from your company versus your competitor. This will help you better refine your value proposition of why shoppers choose your company.

How? This area is the most significant change in a consumer’s shopping cycle. As recently as 15 years ago, most product research was done in stores or catalogs or magazines. Today, product research is done in many ways. In the living room, in the boardroom, at the hospital, you name it. Most shoppers start their search at Amazon.com or on Google by searching on a product.

Many searches start with an opportunistic email promoting a product. From there, we may find the shopper looking at the item on that store’s website.

Consumers likely check product reviews, from other consumers. They may read professional reviews. Browse the Internet on SmartPhone.

The point is to understand your customer’s research process. It will vary widely. But in many cases it’s something like this.

An event triggers an interest in a product.                                                                                                       Check other brands or alternative products.                                                                                                     Conduct research by looking at a product’s pictures, reading descriptions.                                               Evaluate the product’s real value, and eventually make a purchase decision.                                             Narrow your selection and shop for price.                                                                                                   Seek out reviews or ask friends.

Where? That leads us to the where customers are researching. They could be reading relevant blogs, going to brick and mortar stores, checking comparison shopping engines, and reading trade publication articles. They may be looking at Pinterest boards, Facebook posts, and checking with their network of friends on Twitter.

They will be using tablets (increasingly the shopper’s preference), smartphones, laptops, desktops, Xboxes, and store visits.

Can an ecommerce merchant be in all of these places with your message? Likely no. But you can identify where your customers are looking for information as they move through their cycle and try to make sure you are seen. You can also ensure that your messaging and content are mobile friendly.

To compete in the future, your store needs to provide input and information to support all those steps. If you lack reviews, your customers will seek them out elsewhere.

Most ecommerce merchants can describe their customers in a general way. They likely know basic demographics –  age range, gender, income level. But, do they understand the “why, where, when, and how”  their customers make their purchases? These basic tenants of marketing are more important than ever.

The buying process has never been more complex. Consumers have hundred of places online to purchase products that meet their needs. They may shop at home, at work, in the grocery store. They may be using an Android phone, an iPhone, or an Xbox.

Posted in e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: alternative, Android, brick and mortar, comparison, competitor, consumers, content, costs, customers, cycle, data, databases, desktops, ecommerce, Facebook's, flexibility, Iphone, laptops, leads, Merchant's, mobile, ongoing, online, phone, pinterest, platform, price, product, profiles, purchase, selection, shop, shoppers, smartphone, store's, tablets, target, trigger, value, websites, xbox

10 Reasons Point Of Sale Systems are Better Than Cash Registers

Cash registers were the only game in town not too long ago, but these days companies have many more choices. Replacing antiquated cash registers with modern POS (point of sale devices carries a number of important benefits, including: 

1. Can cut down on user errors. Hitting a wrong key is always a risk when ringing a sale, but point of sale devices have built in checks to ensure that the information is entered accurately.

2. Customers receive more informative itemized receipts with a point of sale devices. Many cash registers can only print the date and the amount of the sale, but since point of sale devices are tied into the inventory control system they can provide much more detailed information, including a description of the item, the list price and the sale price.

3. Easy to look up past transactions. If you need to know how much you sold last Tuesday a point of sale system can give you that information in a snap. It would take many hours of laborious work to find the same answer using a cash register.

4. Maintenance and repair costs are often much lower on a point of sale device than a cash register.  The number of companies that repair cash registers is dwindling, and that means that repair costs can be rather high.  There are many vendors who repair point of sale devices, and that can keep repair costs low.

5. Provide faster service than old fashioned cash registers. Every part of the process, from authorizing a credit card transaction to printing a customer receipt, is faster on a point of sale device.

6. Simplify the accounting process. Old fashioned cash registers force accountants to sort through hundreds of receipts, but with a point of sale system financial personnel can simply use the built in reports or create their own.

7. Unlike a cash register, a point of sale system often includes an overall inventory management system. Store owners can use a point of sale system to track their biggest sellers and reorder those products when stock gets low.

8. Workers now a days are often more comfortable with point of sale devices than old fashioned cash registers. Generation now entering the workforce never knew a time without computers, and as a result they are very comfortable working with computerized technology like point of sale devices.

9. You can use a point of sale system to create your own purchase orders, eliminating an extra step in the ordering process. You can even automate the ordering process to make sure you never run out of your hottest selling products.

10. You can see real time inventory with a point of sale device, something that even the best cash registers simply cannot do.  In fact, many companies have found that implementing a point of sale system virtually eliminates the need for a costly hand count.

There are many reasons why your company should consider  state of the art point of sale device and ditching the old fashioned cash register. These devices can lower the cost of doing business while increasing productivity, and that can be good for the bottom line.

Ready to make the switch from a cash register to a point of sale system? National Transaction can provide the software, hardware and support for any POS need. NTC integrate your payment processing into many accounting software titles such as Intuit Quickbooks or Peachtree Accounting. NTC can also provide integation for any restaurant cash register system and all industry specific solutions. NTC provide credit card readers for Android, Apple and Blackberry smartphones and tablet devices. National Transaction can make the World your Point Of Sale.

Posted in Credit card Processing, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: accounting, amount, Android, Apple, authorizing, benefits, blackberry, cash register, computerized, control, costs, credit-card, date, devices, hardware, inventory, itemized, low, maintenance, point of sale, POS, price, print, process, readers, receipts, reorder, repair, sale, sale price, Smartphones, software, stock, system, transactions, vendors, virtually

Reasons Mobile Payments Still Haven’t Caught On

All Alerts, All The Time

Will mobile payment apps hail the arrival of mobile interruptions that never let up? Consumers worry that adopting a mobile wallet app will open them up to a barrage of alerts, sounding the alarm every time the local supermarket has toilet paper for half-off. The services can even track your purchases, opening the floodgates for targeted ads. Frequent alerts could be a deal breaker.

Battery Woes

As smartphones gets bigger, badder and more powerful, battery technology is struggling to keep up. That’s a problem if you want to make a call — but it could be an emergency if your smartphone is your wallet, too. Users are already scrambling to find a charging outlet by lunchtime. Soon, failure to recharge might mean you lack the funds to buy lunch in the first place. Meanwhile, credit cards never need a battery boost, and paper money has worked faithfully since well before the invention of the light bulb.

Do I Have The Right Phone?

You’re ready to make a mobile payment — but is your smartphone? Only the most popular new Android and Windows smartphones have NFC support to enable tap-to-pay services, and Apple has decided to forgo NFC altogether with its iPhone handsets. Users of budget smartphones are likewise out of luck. And though smartphones may seem ubiquitous, only a little more than half of U.S. adults have one.

Is It Secure?

Mobile payments open up a whole new frontier for fraudsters — or so cautious consumers worry. In fact, tap-to-pay technology is as secure as swiping a plastic bank card, and cloud services like PayPal Here support two-factor authentication for extra reassurance. Still, consumers worry their personal information could be intercepted during a transaction, and not everyone is convinced that Google can provide the same level of protection as their bank. But hope remains. The survey found about half of the most security-conscious respondents were much more likely to be interested in mobile payment options if they could be promised 100 percent fraud protection.

Limits, Limits, Limits

Even with a glut of mobile payment options, most lack at least one critical feature. Google’s Wallet app lets you stow your payment information in your phone to buy items in brick-and-mortar shops, but its touch-to-pay functionality is limited to Android devices on Sprint and other smaller carriers. Last year, Apple introduced Passbook, a mobile wallet app that lets users store gift card credits, loyalty card information and more on their iPhones — but only a handful of participating businesses support the app. The mobile payment model isn’t just fragmented — it’s fundamentally limited by countless companies competing for an ever-smaller piece of the pie.

Mobile What?

A recent CMB Consumer Pulse survey showed about half of smartphone users have never even heard of mobile payments. And of the 50 percent who have, a meager 8 percent said they’re familiar with the technology. Banks, credit card companies and others hoping to cash in on consumer interest will have to invest in better messaging first.

What Are The Perks?

Credit cards come with alluring perks — signing bonuses, cash back and travel accommodations, to name a few. But mobile payment systems have serious benefits. They can utilize GPS technology to direct you to deals, keep tabs on your bank account to alert you when you’re near your spending limit, and store unlimited receipts straight to the cloud. Businesses profit from mobile wallets, too, which often charge lower fees than credit card companies and encourage return trips by storing digital copies of loyalty cards.

What’s In It For Me?

To convince consumers to abandon trusted payment options for something new, companies must strike an undeniable value proposition. In the late ‘90s, electronic retail giants like Amazon compelled consumers to enter their 16-digit credit card numbers into online portals, opening up a whole new world of convenience with online shopping. But today’s consumers aren’t convinced that mobile wallets are any more convenient than their physical counterparts. Credit and debit cards already offer a speedy, reliable way to pay on the go. And since they’re accepted virtually everywhere, customers can fork over a card without worry or confusion. Convincing people that new technology is worth their time and effort might ultimately be the toughest nut to crack for mobile payment purveyors.

Where’s The Support?

Even the most enthusiastic adopters are out of luck if their favorite shops lack the infrastructure to process mobile payments. Big-box retailers sprang up in the infancy of computer technology, so joining the mobile payment revolution could necessitate updates to check out hardware and software. Mobile payments could be a boon to businesses, but installing the upgrades could be expensive and disruptive — especially when consumer interest remains low.

Which to Pick?

Even curious consumers are confounded by the array of mobile payment options available. Google, Visa, MasterCard and even mobile carriers like Sprint and Verizon are among the heavy hitters on the mobile payment scene, each offering a discrete service with different apps — and different rules. Some rely on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that lets users simply tap their smartphone against a special reader to pay, while others offer up scannable QR codes. Mobile payments may never take off until one company rises above the rest with a single killer service.

Forget about cash or credit. In 2013, consumers can simply swipe or scan their smartphones at the checkout to pay. A huge array of mobile payment services have sprung up in recent years, urging customers to abandon their plastic credit cards for the “mobile wallet” revolution, but so far, adoption of mobile payment technology has been dismal.

Posted in e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Gift & Loyalty Card Processing, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Near Field Communication, Smartphone Tagged with: alerts, Android, Apple, bank card, battery, cautious, consumers, crack, credit cards, deal, digital, fraud, gift card credits, google, GPS, information, Iphone, lower fees, loyalty cards, mobile, nfc, online, options, paper money, Passbook, payment, PayPal, personal, phone, plastic, portals, powerful, protection, purchases, secure, Smartphones, sprint, storing, support, Swiping, Tap to Pay, touch-to-pay, track, two-factor authentication, wallet, windows

Using A Database for Small Businesses.

When managing a business nothing helps more than raw data. Storing that data in a database makes it infinitely more flexible and accessible. A database is an application that efficiently and effectively stores and retrieves data as well as ties that data to other data. Many large scale accounting applications like QuickBooks, PeachTree and many other titles store all their information in some form of a database.

Tables are like spreadsheets. Rows and columns group together data in an organized manner. Databases can have many tables with many columns or just a few. Relational databases like SQL database engines link tables together using what are known as primary and foreign keys. So in the example of an invoice the Customer table has a Primary key uniquely identifying a specific customer from the rest of all of the customers. The Invoice table stores a foreign key in its table so the match between customer id’s links the two tables. The invoices themselves also have a primary key so that there can be many invoices for the same customer. These concepts are actually born of a mathematics branch known as Algebra.

Data at its most basic level is a specific bit of information. Like the number 19 or a specific date and/or time. A database holds these bits of data and an application built to interact with a database is used to generate information from the data. A clearer example is the invoice. An invoice has quantities, part numbers, serial numbers, account numbers, dates and even totals which are not stored in the database but are calculated each time the invoice is accessed. Invoices bring many bits of data to a single entity most commonly referred to as a report. Looking at a common invoice explains a transaction with the details stored in many tables all tying back to a single transaction.

Database servers run a service that can be connected over connections on a local area network or over the internet to allow applications on different computers access to data simultaneously. Many websites like Facebook, NASA and even Google make extended use of databases to supply services to millions of users concurrently. Whether it’s over the internet or across a physical office space, a database can be the heart of a businesses information technology.

SQL databases conform to an industry standardized set of functionality so that complex queries can be performed without knowing the underlying technical architecture.

Open Source

Open Source is usually associated with applications that are free to download, distribute and modify. Many times open source applications are developed by a community of developers over the internet that take feature suggestions from the user community and build them into the application. Open source applications tend to follow one of several ‘licenses’ like the GPL or General Public License to make sure the program is unmolested or incorporated into a proprietary software trying to take credit for the programming code.

There are many examples of open source titles here.
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/All

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages

Open Source Databases

One aspect of open source known as LAMP has become wildly popular as the internet has matured. Lamp stands for Linux, the operating system, Apache, the web server component, MySQL, a wildly popular free and open database engine and the P stands for Perl, Python or PHP the three most popular languages of backend programming. Combining these components provides a very fertile ground for developing Web Applications that can be served across an office or the world. Many sites like Google and WordPress take full advantage of these technology to create feature rich applications that run in a web browser but work like a traditional desktop application like Microsoft Word. Being open source allows anyone to build on top of or out of the offering. This means you can customize the programming of any of these applications to best fit your particular style or way of doing business. This is a huge time saver for any small business.

Some common examples of open source applications that utilize Lamp architecture are listed below:
SugarCRM – A contact and lead management system to manage a sales force.
WordPress – The most popular blogging application on the internet.
OpenCart – An extremely flexible shopping cart software.
GNUCash – A full fledged accounting program.

Mobile Devices

Today we have smartphones and tablets that have web browsers built in and available for each platform. Using new techniques known as adaptive or responsive web layouts, information on a page automatically transform a web page to smaller displays. So any page can be designed once and displayed on a desktop browser, a tablet browser or a mobile phone browser. This allows web designers to best optimize the content for smaller displays while leaving the pages viewed on a desktop for a larger view. Using responsive design techniques your business data can even extend to mobile devices like iPhones and Android or Blackberry phones and tablets. The potential is huge for your business.

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Point of Sale Tagged with: Android, bits, blackberry, data, database, e-commerce, information technology, Iphone, MySQL, open source, relational, shopping cart, smartphone, SQL, tablet

Same-Day Delivery Debut is Official with Google

Google announced Wednesday that it is opening its Google Shopping Express service to shoppers in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, marking the official launch and first big expansion of the company’s same-day delivery service. Google began testing the retail delivery service this year among a limited set of invited consumers in a few areas within the Bay Area, but the new announcement extends the service to anyone in an expanded region ranging from San Francisco to San Jose. With the service, online shoppers can place online orders from several chain stores and have those products delivered within the day.

Also on Wednesday Google released an app for iOS and Android that allows users to browse the shopping sites and order products directly from their smartphones. New users who sign up before the end of the year can get six months of free, unlimited delivery service; it costs $4.99 per store order.

Race to Deliver
Google is not the only company to experiment with the same day delivery offerings. Walmart and eBay are both testing similar services…eBay now even offers the delivery within an hour, although consumers can only shop from a single store. Amazon is also following in the footsteps of companies like Fresh Direct and rolling out same-day deliveries on groceries to consumers in Los Angeles and Seattle.  Google understands that it will have tough competition in the space and can afford to take a loss on the service at first, which is why it is offering the service for free for new users, said an e-commerce consultant. It is evident from the low price and free sign-up offer that Google is not interested in making money in the short term, that will come once there is a widespread adoption of their service…

A Lot of Challenges Ahead
Although Google is not a retail hub at its core, the company has other strenghts that could help it gain an advantage over its competitiors. Being a default search provider for many millions of users on all platforms, from desktops to tablets right through to mobile phones, can give Google an edge over Amazon and eBay.

Still the key element to a successful e-commerce platform is logistics. Google might have deep pockets and effective algorithms, but it has a a lot of cathing up to do to make sure its delivery service could compete with those of companies like Amazon and eBay, which have years of experience delivering products to consumer worlwide.

“Google certainly has the stamina and budget to give it a good run, but there are a lot of moving parts”. Being a big data company doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be good at the logistics, so they’re going to have a lot of challenges ahead.

Posted in Credit card Processing, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Merchant Account Services News Articles Tagged with: Amazon, Android, app, delivery, desktops, e-commerce, ebay, google, iOS, mobile phones, online, platforms, shopping, tablets, walmart