What's the ideal EMV / chip card POS set up in Vin65?

Point of Sale
1

Hi,

I’m brand new to Vin65 and the forum. We’re a new winery in Ontario opening our doors for the first time this summer so there’s loads going on right now and I’m trying to get my head around POS setup. POS will be our main sales channel. I’m thinking 2 ipads behind the bar with a single printer and cash drawer. I think I’ve read every article, forum post and FAQ that I can find on this topic but I’m left with some questions. You chaps on this forum seem jolly good at answering questions (I’m English, so I do actually talk like this sometimes).

I can see that nothing is going to work perfectly, but I’m curious as to what wineries do about the following issues specifically in Canada, or if anyone in the US has some good ideas.

One of the main attractions of Vin65 was email capture at POS, and the seamlessness of doing everything on an iPad. But the hurdle to this in Canada is that a) people use chip cards, and like using them rather than swiping and b) we need to take debit cards (Interac) which I think you can only use with a chip machine. Change Merchant Solutions provides such a machine, but from what I see we’ll then lose a) email capture on the iPad, b) any ability to tip without asking the customer whether they want to and how much in advance (which is a crappy experience) c) the slick iPad-only POS.

The tipping is the main issue here - does the CMS card machine let the customer add a tip and then automatically show this in Vin65? If not, how do you handle gratuities? The only alternative I can see is to use another payment terminal and gateway, have tasting room staff manually enter the order total, the customer is then prompted to enter the tip, the staff add it into Vin65. It seems like a lot of extra steps and open to error in a busy tasting room…

OR do we just not accept debit, or perhaps only use the machine for debit. Again, not great. Any suggestions much appreciated.

Another issue. I’ve read somewhere that the cash draw opens every time a receipt is printed, even if it’s a card payment, which seems bizarre. Surely this isn’t true!? Is there a way around that?

I think those are my main questions right now, but if there are any other suggestions that fall into the “I wish I’d done that from the beginning” category I’d love to hear them too.

Cheers,
Mike

2

Hi Mike,

We’re a winery based in BC that started using Vin65 last year for our ecommerce, wine club and POS (on tablets). There are some challenges with being Canadian in this. Need to be set up with Authorize.net, and the ONLY system that works with that for debit and credit is Global Payments, so that is what we set up for all ecommerce and wine club. We already had Moneris handsets for our POS so we kept that last year but will be moving everything to Global Payments in the tasting room too. We don’t have our handsets set up for tip options, so not sure how that might work.

3

Thanks Erin, that’s helpful.

Unfortunately Authorize.net is no longer being offered to new Vin65 customers as an option (perhaps because Change Merchant Solutions now works in Canada?) So it looks like I’ll have to work something out with their kit, or find another system.

4

Hello,
I’m very late to this party - Erin or Mike - if you’re still around I would love the opportunity to take 10 minutes of your time to discuss further. We’re looking at Wine Direct and I’m struggling to understand the payment solutions roll out in Canada that is optimal.

If any of you (or anyone else who is feeling charitable) can lend a hand it would be very much appreciated!

Mario

5

Wait – there are still no EMV readers that work with the WineDirect POS?

Seems odd…

6

As far as I’m aware there has been no change in this - it’s swipe a card or nothing. In Canada no one swipes a card anymore, it’s like going back to the 1990s!

We use a separate card terminal system (provided by CMS Change Merchant Solutions / Wine Direct Payments). It’s excellent, and customers can just tap their debit, credit or phone to pay. But because it’s not linked to Wine Direct, we are constantly finding payments are taken but not recorded correctly in the POS. In 2019 we had approx $2k of sales that went through the card terminals but are not in the POS. It’s a nightmare when it comes to record keeping.

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7

The ideal solution here would be for Wine Direct to support an integrated chip reader, like the kDynamo.

Any thoughts on this, Wine Direct staff?

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