How eThor's EMV Pay-At-The-Table is saving local businesses.

In the past few years we have seen many local merchants forced to become EMV compliant with limited options.

What is EMV? EMV is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards based on chip card technology

This wasn't a tough transition for merchants using basic credit card terminals to accept credit card payments. Some Payment organizations & Banks had well thought out plans to get their merchants updated with an affordable new age solution like Poynt.

Unfortunately, some large POS providers have failed miserably at the EMV transition, leaving their merchants in the dark. Imagine being a local business and paying $10k-$15k for POS hardware and then a year or two later that POS company says "you need to upgrade your hardware again". I'd pay to watch a sales rep have that conversation with my Italian father/restaurant owner. Guaranteed he would be 'swimming with the fishes' before any 'POS migration' happen.

No reason for the high blood pressure, eThors here to save the day.

What is eThor? eThor is a powerful pay-at-the-table technology for Poynt that offers EMV compliant solutions for Micros, Aloha, and Dinerware.

Now resellers of Poynt can walk into a local business using legacy POS (Micros, Aloha & Dinerware) and say "I have your EMV pay-at-the-table solution and it's 1/5 the price of updating your POS hardware". The merchant can keep their existing POS hardware and use the Poynt Terminal as the payment device. This is what I like to call a "home run" solution and if you're not selling eThor, you're missing out. It's also a great way in the door for Payment Sales Reps looking to build their portfolio. And let's be honest, any merchant that invests in a legacy POS is most likely doing high volume processing.

What were the merchants saying about the EMV migration?

After learning about the EMV heartache for legacy merchants, I interviewed a few local businesses in San Francisco that were using Aloha and Micros. A majority of these businesses said they were not planning on becoming EMV compliant because they could not afford it. This meaning the merchant would be responsible for all chargebacks, fraud, and theft when accepting credit card payments. It was more cost effective to not migrate over then it was to take a hit on chargebacks...yes that's how much these migrations suck :(

Whats the customer check-out experience like with eThor?

A lot of businesses thought the chip & pin (new EMV) experience was slowing down the 'customer check out experience'. The benefit of eThor being available on Poynt is the customer can use any type of payment (EMV, Apple/Android Pay, Debit, etc) and the terminal is mobile so it's easy to walk to a table OR check-out customers while they wait in line. A smaller hand-held device named the Poynt 5 is being released in 2018 to help merchants turn tables and retail customers even faster.

What are the Legacy POS Resellers saying about EMV?

Large companies like NCR (Aloha), Heartland (Dinerware) and Oracle (Micros) own these legacy POS companies. They have many resellers around the nation we refer too as VARs (Value Added Resellers) in the payments world. I couldn't write this article without reaching out to a VAR or Legacy POS Reseller (or two) to get their opinion. Well, believe it or not, they skipped my questions, cut right the point and asked how to get set up with eThor. They were so desperate to get their merchants updated on an affordable EMV solution all they wanted to speak about was how to become a reseller...which they both are now :)

"Wait, pay at the table!?!? My restaurant is never doing that" ...ugh I hate when I hear that phrase. It's like welcome to the 21st-century America, you're literally no longer behind on just Education and Healthcare, but now Payments. That's right, even that big country that sits on top of us already discovered EMV & Pay-At-The-Table years before we could figure it out. It's also absolutely insane that we still hand a stranger our credit card and then allow them to walk away with our personal information everytime we dine out. But that fights for another article.

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If you're a Merchant wanting to get set up with Poynt or eThor please email us, [email protected]