WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide

Transcription

1 WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide This document provides information on options to consider when establishing a point-of-sale environment for your winery, or when thinking about expanding your winery s point-of-sale options. While this document details how the WineWeb POS service can be utilized in various scenarios, readers using other vendor POS systems can gain valuable insight into options and, factors to consider, that may be available through their POS service provider. Version 1.1 January 2014 Table of Contents Locations... 2 Network... 2 Physical network... 2 Internet access... 3 Contingencies for network outages... 3 Equipment... 4 Stations... 4 Back-office... 5 Mobile device access... 5 Credit Card Readers... 5 Receipt printers... 6 Cash drawers... 7 Barcode scanners... 7 Conclusion... 8 Additional POS guides are available for our clients in their Administration Console at Resources: Guides. o POS Installation Guide o POS User Quick Start Guide o Position Paper: Using a Tablet Device as a POS Station A knowledgebase is available at Resources: Help System Online help is available by clicking the Help button in the POS Online help for the preferences is available in the POS at Utilities: Preferences: Help WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 1 January 2014

2 Locations Where do you want to process sales? Your tasting room is an obvious answer, but there are likely other locations. What about festivals and farmer s markets? What about the winery, if it s separate from the tasting room? What are the different factors to consider at those locations? Sales tax rate Credit card merchant account Products available Equipment (touch screens, mobile devices, receipt printers, ticket printers, etc.) Warehouse (inventory location) used for onsite sales Staff access You don t want a separate installation of a POS system at each location, since the following common factors aren t different and you want to have access to these factors across all locations: Customers Club members Loyalty program Customer order history Shipping destinations Compliance rules Gift certificates Inventory levels at other warehouses Entire list of wines and non-wine items Event reservations WineWeb POS is multi-location so all the different factors can be set as preferences for each location, while all the common factors are accessible from any location, as there is a common web-based database for each winery. There is also support for consolidated tasting rooms that sell products from multiple wineries. We call this consolidation, partner wineries and we allow for specific products from each winery to be sold in the consolidated tasting room and provide for inventory control between each winery and the tasting room. Network When setting up a computer network, you have several options, although your location may have an impact on availability of some options. Physical network Do you plan to string Ethernet cable to each POS station or will some stations operate using a wireless connection? Do you plan to have a printer in the kitchen or bar area that is independent of a POS station (for printing tickets for food or drink orders)? Will there be mobile devices (tablets or smartphones) used by your staff? WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 2 January 2014

3 You may want to choose a hybrid solution where your main POS stations and any networkconnected printers are wired connections and you have a WiFi hotspot for mobile devices and any outdoor areas. Internet access You ll want a reasonably fast and stable connection to the Internet. Depending on your location and the service providers in your area, your choices could include DSL, cable, fixed wireless, satellite or a cell phone hotspot. If considering a satellite connection, make sure your POS vendor can support the increased latency. Also check with your POS vendor to understand the amount of data that is typically transferred on each transaction to ensure you have a sufficient connection speed to accommodate your anticipated traffic. WineWeb POS supports all types of Internet connections, including satellite. The service has been designed with advanced browser caching features to ensure that the minimum amount of data is transferred across the connection. Smaller tasting rooms with one or two POS stations can operate on a minimum 256K DSL connection. Contingencies for network outages With any Internet-based POS service, you ll want to be prepared for outages. Outages can occur if you lose electricity, a cable is cut, your local ISP suffers an outage, a communications outage occurs between your winery and the server, a server failure or data center interruption. For electrical outages, installing uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) on your modem and router and on each POS station can provide good protection. For local ISP issues, a cell phone that can function as a mobile WiFi hotspot can be used to provide an alternate connection. Such a mobile hotspot can also be used at remote sites such as festivals, where other connections may not be available. For issues where the winery can connect to the Internet, but can t access the POS server, backup plans need to be in place to accept orders. The WineWeb POS has an offline mode that stores orders and payment information in a local database in each station s browser. Once the connection is restored, these offline transactions can be synced with the server and credit card payments can be processed. The system automatically senses a network outage and switches to offline mode when necessary. Other options for a server outage include having paper order forms available to capture the items ordered and payment information. The WineWeb POS can easily produce these order forms for all available products. In addition, if you want to process the credit cards during an outage, you could have a credit card terminal that is connected to a phone line, which could be used during the outage, although this makes syncing orders with the POS more complicated, and we ve seen very little exposure to declined credit card payments, especially if an or phone number is captured for each customer during the outage. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 3 January 2014

4 Equipment The equipment and peripherals you choose for your POS stations may take the most time, but only because there are many options. Your POS vendor may dictate the equipment and may require you to purchase the equipment from them, which would make the equipment decision easier, but it may cause you to reconsider your software vendor. With WineWeb, we don t dictate or sell the equipment. We suggest equipment that we like, and know works well with our system, but you re free to choose. The WineWeb POS works on any device with a browser (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones). If you have equipment from your current POS vendor, WineWeb POS likely works with that. Stations One of the main functions of a POS station is to efficiently process a sale. While part of the efficiency is a function of well-designed software, the physical interaction with the equipment is a major component. Your choice of keyboard, mouse, screen size, touch screen, as well as input devices such as card readers and scanners, and output devices such as receipt printers are all important considerations. We understand that counter space in a tasting room is usually limited. We also understand that aesthetics are important, so we don t recommend placing a cash drawer on the counter, then stacking a CPU, monitor, keyboard and mouse on top of that. Such a configuration has better use as a boat anchor. We currently recommend that our clients consider a touch screen laptop for each POS station. It s aesthetically pleasing, doesn t take up much space, has a real keyboard, doesn t have extra cables for the keyboard and mouse, has the advantages of touch, mouse and key entry, and you can attach almost any type of peripheral to it. Compare this to a tablet device, and we believe you agree that a tablet is less efficient. Tablets have a smaller screen size, making it harder to read. Their on-screen keyboard covers part of the screen and it s harder to type on. Additional hardware is required to prop them up to a good viewing angle. They re easier to steal. You can t directly attach the peripherals needed for an efficient station, like receipt printers, barcode scanners, access card readers, etc. We understand that tablets are trendy, but we believe they can be better used in other ways in your tasting room. Some other vendors promote ipads for the POS, but that may be due to their software only working on that device. About three years ago, we published a position paper on using tablets with a POS view it at wineweb.com/info. Also, if the software is developed as an app for the tablet, versus software that runs in a browser, there is about a week lag time to redeploy any software revisions through the Apple or Google app stores. For a critical software bug that has no good workaround, that may seem like an eternity. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 4 January 2014

5 Back-office Does your POS software allow you to do other functions in the back-office such as inventory management, wine club management, sales reporting, etc.? Does your POS software require an additional license fee for another station? WineWeb POS can run on multiple stations with no increase in fees. The devices selected for these functions can be any desktop or laptop. Mobile device access Additional mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) can be useful in a tasting room environment, and should be considered in the planning process. Some scenarios to consider: A large tour group can create a backlog at the POS stations near the end of the allotted time. Additional staff using mobile devices can take customer orders, reducing the time needed at the POS station for just the payment processing. In a table service environment, wait staff could use a tablet or their own smartphone to take orders. Kitchen or bar tickets could automatically print in those locations for new items ordered. Tablet devices could be handed to customers to use for viewing additional information and for capturing customer information and preferences during a tasting. Guests arrive for an event and the staff can use mobile devices to check-in the attendees. Additional consideration should also be given to how these mobile devices interact with other peripherals. Do you want the mobile device to be able to swipe a credit card? If so, then what type of credit card reader can be attached to that device? Does that card reader work with your POS software? Do you want the mobile device to print things like receipts or kitchen/bar tickets? How do you establish a remote connection to a printer and does your POS software support this? Credit Card Readers A device to read the magnetic stripe on a credit card is the most common peripheral to attach to a POS station. The credit card processing fees on a swiped credit card are typically lower than if the number was typed into the POS. The typical card reader is a small device with a slot for the card that includes a cable that attaches to a USB port on your computer. The card reader is usually a keyboard-emulation device, meaning that the swipe is treated as if it were being typed into the data field on the screen. Such a magnetic card reader can be used for additional functions in a POS system: Access card login. A card for each user with their login code could be swiped to login to the system. Wine club or loyalty cards that contain a magnetic stripe can be swiped to identify the customer. Driver s licenses can be swiped to identify a customer or to populate their name, address and birthdate information Gift cards can be swiped for issuance and redemption. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 5 January 2014

6 Debit cards While most payment gateways allow you to accept debit cards as credit cards, the fees for accepting them as debit cards are much lower. Typically this requires a special card reader that can securely capture the PIN entered by the customer. Devices such as the Magtek IPAD card reader can be used instead or, in addition to, a regular card reader to process debit PIN transactions. Microphone jack card readers If you plan to use a device that doesn t have a USB port, such as many tablets and smartphones, there are additional considerations for attaching a card reader. There is no keyboard-emulation mode for any card reader that is connected via the microphone jack, so you must ensure that your POS software works with the specific card reader. Many microphone jack card readers, like Square, are closed systems that only work with their software and payment gateway. Currently, for these types of card readers to function with your POS, the software must be developed or converted into an app for the specific POS device, so the software has access to the data being sent as an audio stream from the microphone jack. Direct access from a browser to the microphone jack is currently possible on some browsers, however the routines to translate the audio stream into characters read from the magnetic stripe are not yet available. Because of this, an app is needed on these devices to provide access to the microphone jack. WineWeb has published a position paper on this topic at Since 2008, when the WineWeb POS was released, it has been a service that runs on any device with a browser. Some browsers and devices work better than others, especially when connecting to peripheral devices. In early 2013, due to client requests to use an ipad with a microphone jack connected credit card reader, WineWeb created a POS ipad app that combined its POS service and an app to read credit card data from a microphone jack card reader. In September 2013, WineWeb discontinued that app in favor of a third-party app that could support multiple devices, multiple card readers and multiple types of scans (credit card, driver s license, membership cards, etc.) with the scan data being sent directly to the appropriate form field in the POS browser window. Receipt printers Your POS environment will likely have receipt printers that can print customer receipts. In larger environments, these printers can also be used to print kitchen and bar tickets. These are typically small thermal printers that attach via USB cable to each POS station. Examples are the Epson TM-T88V and Star Micronics TSP100. Receipt printers are setup as Windows (or Mac) printers and can be shared across your network. This may be useful if you have temporary POS stations (like a laptop) that you setup in the tasting room for busy days. The temporary station could access a shared printer on the network to print receipts. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 6 January 2014

7 Some receipt printers, like the Star Micronics TSP143LAN printer, can attach via Ethernet cable directly to your local network. These printers can be used without a POS station, such as in a kitchen to print kitchen tickets for new food items. A varied configuration like this is available in the WineWeb POS. Each POS station defines the printers on the network that it wants to communicate with, and the name given in the Windows printer setup function determines what documents are routed to a given printer. For example, a Windows printer that contains the word receipt in its name is sent receipts from that POS station. Including the phrase kitchenticket in the printer name routes food orders to that printer. Multiple words can be attached to a single printer, if using it for dual purposes, such as receipt kitchenticket. As long as that POS station can access a receipt printer on the network, whether it s directly connected, a shared printer from another POS station, or a network-connected printer, it can print the appropriate type of documents to it. Printing from tablets and smartphones Since most tablets don t allow a printer to be connected directly to it, and most wireless printing apps for these devices don t support receipt printing, the ability to print receipts and tickets from mobile devices can be challenging. WineWeb POS has addressed this mobile printing limitation and allows any mobile device to print to any receipt/ticket printer on the network. You merely set the preference for the mobile device as not being able to print directly, and then any receipt or ticket is queued to print via one of the real POS stations that is running a print processor in a background browser window. The WineWeb POS also includes an Order Taker component, which is very useful for a table service environment. This allows a staff person to login to Order Taker mode from their smartphone or tablet and create / update / view orders, with checkout occurring at a POS station. Receipts and kitchen/bar tickets can be produced from the Order Taker component. Cash drawers A cash drawer can be attached to any receipt printer via a special cable and can be enabled to open at the appropriate times. The receipt printer receives a special command from the POS and sends a signal to the cash drawer to open. Barcode scanners If you wish to scan barcodes on your items to checkout a customer, then you ll need a barcode scanner. Typically these are laser devices that can be placed on a stand or used as a handheld device. They typically attach to the POS station via a USB cable. Barcode scanners can be purchased that scan regular (1D) barcodes like UPC codes. More expensive scanners can scan 1D and 2D barcodes, like the barcodes on the back of driver s licenses, so your purchase decision should be based on the type of barcodes you intend to scan. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 7 January 2014

8 In addition to item barcodes and driver s licenses, barcodes may exist on wine club membership cards, loyalty program cards, gift certificates / gift cards and event tickets, so even if you don t intend to scan products, you may need a barcode scanner for other types of barcodes. Also the WineWeb system allows online event check-in using a mobile device or laptop, including barcode scanning of tickets. Conclusion There are many things to consider when shopping for a new POS system or determining how best to expand your existing point-of-sale environment. This document has discussed many of these considerations. Obviously price and customer support from the software and hardware vendors is a consideration as well. We hope that this document has expanded your thought process and informed you how the WineWeb POS service addresses these items. Further information on our services is available at wineweb.com/services. WineWeb: Point-of-Sale Planning Guide 8 January 2014