Everyone hates losing their internet connection, but when you’re a restaurant or a retailer, a lack of internet can mean a lack of business.
If your internet goes down during business hours, you lose your ability to process credit card payments.
Having a system in place to protect your business in case your internet goes down can keep you up and running, even when your internet fails.
To process any transaction, you’ll need an internet connection; without it, the customer’s card can’t be processed. The information that needs to be sent back and forth between your bank and the customer’s bank to process credit cards will not be sent.
Whenever you swipe a card, that card reader sends an instant message to that customer’s bank, asking for permission to charge this card. If yes, the transaction will be approved; if not, your system will show an error message or say “declined.”
This communication method only works if your point-of-sale system is online. Otherwise, you can just swipe the card and store the card information for later.
It may seem trivial, but without this instant communication, your point-of-sale system can’t see if there are any funds on the card or if it’s been reported as lost/stolen.
Running purchases offline means you’re storing the credit card data locally until you’re up and running on the internet. If you remember last month’s post, storing any credit card data on a local network is incredibly unsafe.
If your business is in the habit of processing credit cards offline through your point-of-sale system, you’re not accepting payments in a PCI compliant manner, meaning you’ll be fined an extra fee every month on your credit card processing statement.
You may have to turn away any payment method that isn’t cash. Your business will lose money if you can only accept cash payments while your internet is down.
Your business can protect itself in case of an internet outage, all you need to do is get the service that gives you 3G/4G failover.
It’s a rather inexpensive solution that can be wrapped up with other support agreements with an excellent point-of-sale company.
Having backup internet prevents downtime waiting for the internet to come back. It will flip on seamlessly and instantly, and you can keep accepting all payments, and not store sensitive credit card information on your network.
