Don’t let thieves use your retail establishment as the center of their operations. Here’s four quick tips from Sage Payment Solutions to give you some guidance from Rob Bertke, senior vice president of research & development

If the Whos Had Been PCI Compliant, The Grinch Wouldn’t Have Stolen Anything – It’s vital as well as required that any business accepting credit or debit cards is Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant. A very easy way to lose customers is to allow their payment information to be pilfered when shopping at your store or your online website. Maintaining PCI compliance helps plug security holes, plus serves to significantly dampen the effects of a breach.

Your Holiday Cards Don’t Need Encryption, But Your Payment Information Does- Whether your organization is PCI-compliant or not – and hopefully it is — fully encrypting all points of payment is paramount to keeping vital company and customer information from being hacked. End-to-end encryption is the technical term for this practice, and it essentially boils down to scrambling the data sent from one device to another. A company’s mobile payment devices, credit card terminals, software applications, and online payment portals need built-in encryption functionality when transmitting customer information.

You Should Take In All the Holidays Have to Offer - Scammers frequently attempt to tamper with an organization’s credit card terminals in an effort to steal credit card information, often with a small piece of hardware attached to the actual terminal. Alert your employees to this possibility, and remind them to conduct regular visual assessments of all payment processing equipment. While these information-stealing devices can be concealed to look like a piece of the credit card terminal, attentive employees should be able to easily identify extraneous equipment.

Santa Isn’t the Only One Checking a List - Unfortunately, even with the best payment processing security, a breach can still happen. So, you should keep meticulous credit card sales records. If an issue does arise, it’s essential you have a means of retracing your steps in order to determine where the breach occurred, as well as to prevent any further theft. Not only will the ability to work backwards to determine the source of the breach allow your organization to plug any security holes and abate the possibility of additional customer information becoming exposed, but it can also often lead straight to the credit card fraudster.

The post Four Tips For Retailers On Credit Card Security: A Reminder appeared first on Small Business Technology.

What does that mean? Since so many more businesses have online components, not just for sales but for marketing as well, having an online POS system can save you a significant amount of money versus a traditional POS system.

The thing about online POS systems is that there are so many of them out there. These vary greatly in price and quality, from free and simple to incredibly robust and expensive, and everything in between. Most will offer you a simple interface, reporting on sales, and inventory management all in one package. Some will even offer the ability to integrate with social networking and get your online profile up on top of Google’s lists.

Start with one system and conduct your research from there. For instance, ZingCheckout gives you a standard POS interface with smooth functionality and all the usual abilities – manual entry, bar code scans, cash/credit/split payment options, the works. But one thing your ‘standard’ POS system cannot do is generate easy-to-read on-the-spot reports for your products over a time frame you define. You can also generate digital receipts that can be e-mailed to your customer, a trend on the rise with larger retail outlets. ZingCheckout will run you $49 a month per location.

You can even look into a mobile POS if you’d like; these systems involve a barcode scanner/credit card swiper and a belt-hooked receipt printer. These can also be used to do inventory scans and customer service, to locate what’s in stock and where in the store it should be.

So what happens if your Internet connection goes down? On standard POS systems, your monitor could die, your computer could go down, and so on. Consider too that the reliability of the Internet is usually on the rise as services expand. If your area has reliable connectivity, and your Internet Service Provider has good customer service, this shouldn’t be much of a worry. Additionally, online POS systems usually offer some kind of back-up.

Also, unless you choose to go the mobile POS route or want extra hardware bells and whistles (such as bar code scanners if you don’t have them), with a system like ZingCheckout you only need a computer and Internet connection; you can usually download software within minutes and start using it immediately if it’s free.

Of course, the ‘free’ services don’t offer nearly the benefits that the paid ones do. Most will offer a free and a paid service, with the free service acting as sort of a ‘try before you buy’ system; ZingCheckout does this, so there’s not much risk involved with giving it a shot and seeing what it can do to help your bottom line.

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