[wildman]

One of our friends upgraded to the Genius Terminal from Merchant Warehouse. His complaint was how slow it worked as compared to a traditional stand alone terminal, or the way our system works with Mercury. Is this a normal situation, as I was thinking of a upgrade. He says it's so slow he was going to send his back. said it takes 3 to 5 seconds to communicate with Retail Edge, then another couple seconds to process the transaction. Could this just be a network problem, or is the system just that slow? The other question he had, which I also question, when the customer swipes the card and puts it back in their wallet how does one go about requiring them to take the card back out so you can compare the signature? He said he was encountering irate customers when they had to wait for the terminal to process, and then get their card back out.
If the speed issue can be corrected, is there a mount for the terminal which would allow it to be turned towards the cashier, requiring the customer to hand the card to the cashier to swipe, then turn the terminal back for the customer to sign or enter their pin?

[RetailEdge Moderator]

I guess there are a few things I need to address.

First, yes the Genius does use the internet to process credit cards and yes there are a number of steps to the authorization process, but this should be not be any different or slower than your stand alone dial-up terminal. The process any processor uses should be not different than if you opened up your web browser and hit a web page. Compared to a terminal connecting to the processor via a dial up connection this should be much faster.

That being said there are a number of steps to the process and so with the other steps they might feel the process is slower. To outline the process it goes something like:

1. RetailEdge says that there is a credit card transaction, checks with Merchant Warehouse for some information and then sends the information to the Genius Device with the amount of the sale. The device lights up and asks the customer to swipe their card. The device will wait a pre-set amount of time until the customer swipes their card. But if the customer is ready to swipe their card this should be pretty quick.

2. The Genius device goes out on the internet to check for an approval/decline, etc.

3. The Genius device receives the approval and then asks the customer for their signature. Customer presses Ok.

4. RetailEdge receives the signature information and posts the sale.

The traditional credit card swiping procedure would be a little different.

1. You would tell the customer the amount of the sale and ask them to hand you their card.

2. You would swipe the card. RetailEdge or the processors application would then go out to the internet to contact the servers for an approval, then receive the approval.

3. RetailEdge would then print the receipt with a sign line that the customer must sign.

4. The customer hands the signed receipt to you where you can check his signature before handing them back their card.

So you can see the flow is a little different. But same number of steps and unless their is a problem with the internet connection or the MW servers it should not be slower. Both methods need to go out to the internet. The Genius device does have to go out one more time, but this should be no different than you going to a web page on the internet and probably faster since there is not a whole lot of information going back and forth. If this continues to be an issue they should probably talk to MW about it and have them do some troubleshooting, since it sounds more systemic.

Regarding checking the signature, this is no different than any machine you might see anywhere (the grocery). If they are interested in checking the signature every time this is definitely going to slow the process down and they should come up with a procedure for the clerks to follow so that they grab the customers card before they put it back in their wallet. I am not sure I would recommend checking it each time (typically stores will do only periodic checks) and if he wants to do this each time, then they might want to consider going back to an old method that does not do signature capture.

A couple of things to think about with the Genius. It is doing other things besides signature capture. First it is getting ready for upcoming changes in processing (EMV, Chip PIN etc.). Second it is providing the ability to handle credit card processing without having the customer hand their card to a clerk for processing which is becoming much more the norm.

Hope this helps but if you need more let us know.

One of our friends upgraded to the Genius Terminal from Merchant Warehouse. His complaint was how slow it worked as compared to a traditional stand alone terminal, or the way our system works with Mercury. Is this a normal situation, as I was thinking of a upgrade. He says it's so slow he was going to send his back. said it takes 3 to 5 seconds to communicate with Retail Edge, then another couple seconds to process the transaction. Could this just be a network problem, or is the system just that slow? The other question he had, which I also question, when the customer swipes the card and puts it back in their wallet how does one go about requiring them to take the card back out so you can compare the signature? He said he was encountering irate customers when they had to wait for the terminal to process, and then get their card back out.
If the speed issue can be corrected, is there a mount for the terminal which would allow it to be turned towards the cashier, requiring the customer to hand the card to the cashier to swipe, then turn the terminal back for the customer to sign or enter their pin?