Everything You Need to Know About Credit Card Readers

hello and welcome to happy vending i'm bill and if you're thinking of getting credit card readers for your vending machines this is the video for you [Music] happy vending so there's a lot of factors to think through before you run and get credit card readers for your vending machines and i want to touch on several of them first of all you have to determine whether your machines are making enough money to warrant putting credit card readers on them i feel a machine or an account has to at least be doing fifty dollars a week to warrant you putting credit card readers because there's a lot of expense in doing it first of all you have the expense of the hardware that you have to put on the machine which is the reader itself and the modem and the antenna that communicates with the cell phone towers that's going to cost anywhere from 250 to 350 dollars depending on the type of reader that you get and the quantity that you're buying also you have to pay a monthly fee per machine that will cost you about eight to ten dollars a month per machine and then you also have to account for the processing fee for every sale that goes to the credit card company so if somebody uses their visa card or their discover card you're going to have to pay about six percent for every sale to go to that credit card company as a processing phase so if it was a dollar sale you're looking at six cents off of that dollar so if you feel that your machine is doing enough in sales to warrant a credit card reader how do you start well you really have to first determine what company you're going to get your readers from and as far as i'm concerned you really have to pick between two companies the one that i went with is nyx and the other big one which is actually bigger than nyx that has more readers out there is cantaloupe and cantaloupe used to be called usa technologies just a couple years ago but usa technologies ended up buying the cantaloupe company cantaloupe was a company that had inventory software usa technologies purchased cantaloupe and instead of using the usa technology name usa technology decided to adopt the cantaloupe name because they wanted to go more worldwide and the usa technology name was basically implied usa so you really have to decide between one of those two companies each has their pros and cons the reason i didn't go with cantaloupe which at that time was usa technologies was because i kept reading all these negative reviews about their customer service that they would never answer the phone they would never get back to you the hardware was about the same i had called both companies and priced it out the readers were about the same monthly fees were about the same at around eight dollars a month and the processing fees were about the same it was just that i just heard so many negative things about cantaloupe which at that time was usa that i figured i'd go with nyx i heard more positives about nyx and so i'm still with nyacks today now cantaloupe they have two basic readers that you can pick from one that has an internal modem but that one does not have a chip reader in it and then they have the new engage which has the touch screen and the chip reader and it's pretty much like what nyax has with the vpos touch nyx is basically their only reader for vending machines like these is the vpos touch and they have two versions of it one that has a built-in dollar bill acceptor and then the standard one which just takes credit cards and the apple pay and and all that has the chip reader so what i'm doing today is i'm going to be replacing these old emit nix readers with the new vpos touch why am i doing that well these are four years old and unfortunately pretty much about the same time both of these two breeders went bad and they're only four years old so i'm i am a little disappointed in the lifespan of these nyx readers but i'm kind of invested in the nyx company at this point so i'm not ready to switch to let's say cantaloupe i still hear some bad things about the cantaloupe tech support so i'm sticking with it nyx does have a trade-in program where you can mail these in and they give you a discount on the vpos touch this brand new would cost me about three hundred and forty dollars from nyx if i'm just getting a couple of these brand new but with the trade-in of those this cost me 250 dollars so it is a bit of a discount they are more attractive i've already put one on my other machine here that has a credit card reader which also went bad so all three of my original credit card readers within let's say five months have all gone bad to the point where nyx couldn't you know get these up for me the one over here is is completely offline and then this one usually cancels out payments i i can see this machine still in the software but it's just not processing sales what you get when you buy a new reader from nyx of course you get the instructions and you get some stickers to put on the front this is a template to drill the holes in your machine these new vpos readers they have everything built into the reader part so the modem is in here all the communications is in here you just have this one part in the past you had the separate modem that got mounted inside the machine and then you had a reader on the outside of the machine but this is everything in one which is kind of neat you have this bezel piece here this mounting bezel which if you're putting your reader in the opening for let's say the dollar bill acceptor you would use this bracket that mounts in there in the back with nuts on my g3s i mount the readers right on the point of sale window it usually has a sign in there it says coca-cola or thank you or something like that i just cover that over and mount to that that plastic piece some people do mount them right here on the plexiglas on a g3 machine like this maybe down here i don't like the look of that so i don't do it that way the only problem with mounting it here is you have to put a spacer to bring your credit card reader out otherwise the credit cards hit this trim piece at one time nyx sold in a spacer that goes on the back of your reader to make it come out an extra half inch cantaloupe still sells spacers for their readers for that purpose but when nyx switched to these vpos touches they stop selling the spacer now the only thing you can get is this wedge which sort of tilts the reader either down or you can tilt the reader up which would work because it would bring it out a half inch of course it would tilt it down the only problem is it's designed for the bezel to go in the opening where the dollar bill acceptor is because it has this outer bracket so it doesn't really work for me because i'm mounting flush onto this window just like it wouldn't work if you were putting it here on here because you see this this flange and you don't want to see that so this is really worthless for me so if nyx is listening you gotta bring back the spacers i'm hoping the old spacers which i got for these will work on these because it's the same footprint it's the same size so i'm going to just try to extend it with these existing spacers before i dig into this and start swapping these out i want to just show you what the nyx software looks like and show you what a monthly statement looks like so you get an idea of how much you're getting paid this is what the nyx software looks like when you log in on a computer some of the things that you can see are your credit card sales compared to your cash sales now you'll only get cash sale reports if you have a newer or an updated control board in your machine that will report the cash sales it will tell you how you're doing on the current day how you did for that week for last week for the month for the year looking at last year i had four thousand three hundred and eleven dollars and fifty cents in credit card sales and ten thousand eight hundred sixty one dollars in cash sales that's all three of my machines that have credit card readers combined so i'm making at least that year about half the amount in credit than i did cash last year was kind of a weird year because of covit there were a lot of students out of the building especially the upperclassmen so that was a tough year to really compare so you look at this and you have to decide well i got an additional 4 300 in sales would i have gotten those sales without the credit card breathers maybe maybe not you never know but it is just having that convenience of the credit card reader that maybe these additional people purchase products and you also have some other benefits of having it on there let's take a look at each individual machine and i'll show you some of what the inventory data looks like if i click on my products map this shows me the products that i have in the machine and how many have sold since i last filled it up this helps you figure out whether you need to fill up any of these products so when you go down the machine you have the appropriate products for the machine and then after you fill up the machine you zero all these back out so you know for the next time you have to go service that machine you can also check out last sales on that machine so this tells me every transaction whether it was a cash transaction whether credit card what they purchased when they purchased it and this is very helpful just to check on the machine to make sure the machine is working you know that there's sales happening you know that the credit card reader is accepting credit cards and transactions are happening you can also go to the general information of that machine and see how much is in the cash box of the machine so you know what to expect when you go down there and then after you take out the cash out of the machine you zero this out on the credit card reader so that it will start counting up from zero again so you're probably wondering how you get your money from the company that's running your credit card readers in this case nyx well nyx pays you every week for how much money you bring in and let me bring up one of my statements to show you what that looks like so here's a statement from the week of february 18 to february 24th these are my three machines it tells you how many transactions and though these are only credit card transactions in this statement how many transactions happen how much money the machines brought in in credit card sales it also shows you your processing fee this is the fee that has to go out to the credit card companies it's five point nine five percent so for this machine it was a dollar thirty seven dollar thirty one and for my merlin four which did fifty five dollars in sales it was three dollars and thirty two cents all that added up is six dollars taken out of my gross amount which was a hundred dollars and 75 cents and that leaves me 94.75 so that's what would have been deposited into my bank account in order to get your money you have to link a bank account to the credit card reader company in this case niacc so that they can deposit that money weekly into my account now out of this amount every month they will take your connection fee and you have a connection fee per machine for me it's just under eight dollars per machine every month so it's about twenty five dollars at the beginning of the month for the previous month i would also see in here an offset of the 25 and that gets deducted from the sales from that week if there wasn't enough money for that week in sales it rolls over to the next week until you have enough money also if you didn't get at least five dollars in sales for that week they won't deposit into your account they want to have at least five dollars to run the deposit so the amount would carry over to the next week if you do decide to get a credit card reader you should contact each of those two big companies contact the sales rep from nyx contact the sales rep from cantaloupe explain to them how many readers you're thinking of putting in what type of readers you want to get ask them how much the hardware fee will be for the readers how much the monthly processing fees will be for the credit card companies how much the monthly fee will be for running each reader and weigh your options one more big factor before you go and buy credit card reader you do have to determine whether your machines will support a credit card reader if you have old single price machines chances are they are not going to support a credit card reader you really want to make sure your machine supports mdb which is the protocol that the machines at least the modern machines machines within the last 20 years used to communicate between the coin acceptor the bill acceptor and the control board and if your machine has mdb you know it has the white six pin mdb plugs inside it then you should be good to go with a credit card reader before you do any work with installing a credit card reader whether it's a cantaloupe or a non-x or anything you want to make sure you unplug that machine because you don't want to run the risk of messing up your control board or your other devices by unplugging plugging things in with current going through the system and i open it up to get out the credit card readers on these machines i have to remove the dollar bill acceptors just because that point of sale window is right behind there here is the emit modem these were magnetic so you just put them on the inside and this is the mdb connector this was the connector that went to the reader and this is the antenna connector this is the part i really have to send back for the exchange it has your sim card in it just like a cell phone would and it's basically a cell phone plan except it doesn't do voice it's just doing data so you don't have to pay as much as you would for a cell phone i like to mount my antennas on the inside of my machines these are magnetic if you put them on the outside of the machine sometimes people pull them off now both nyx and cantaloupe have high output antennas for machines where you don't get a good cell signal from and those are designed to mount on the outside of the machine and they actually bolt in you drill a hole in the door and you put you know a rubber spacer on it and then put a bolt on it so people can't really pull them off they're a little more robust than these these you can of course put them on the outside of the machine and i have done that but almost always you know a student will grab it and put it on the side luckily nobody has ever pulled it so hard that it's broken the antenna off but if i have strong signal which on most of my machines i do i just put this on the inside this connector is the dex connector plugs into the dex port of the machine so it can get your your sales data here is the mdb plug which is going into the control board and then it wise off to the dollar bill acceptor then which also branches off to the coin acceptor this is a fairly new dollar bill acceptor you can check out my other video where i install that this is a recycling unit which gives back dollar bills is change because of course you want to have as many payment options as possible for your customers that's how you make more sales you want them to be able to pay with fives or tens or apple pay or debit card or a credit card the more options you have to take their money the more money you will make because your competition in my case the school cafeteria they don't take credit cards so if a student only has a credit card they don't have any money in their their school account they can come here and use their debit card on these machines same thing with the school store here in this building they don't take credit cards right now so i have that advantage over them the antenna for the the new vpos touches is not the same as these emit modems it doesn't have this screw on connector so i have to take out this antenna it does me no good same thing with the cord it's a different cord for the vpos touches so that all has to come out now i do have to say i have been a little disappointed with nyx recently because first of all all three of my emits have gone bad in year four which i feel is you know really not old enough for a device i mean a lot of my dollar bill acceptors and my coin acceptors in these machines are 15 20 years old and they're still working so of course you send them out for repair occasionally but not that often and with these emits you can't get them repaired and ix doesn't support them anymore your only option when they go bad they don't even have parts like a replacement modem for them your only option is the upgrade to the vpos touch which is you know 20 uh 250 dollars i do like the way they look i think they're more attractive i i'm sure students like using them more because you know they have a touch screen but they're not without fault because the first one that i put in on my merlin 4 machine which i have a video of me installing that you can check that out it's a more detailed install video that one you know within a couple weeks it stopped processing sales and i contacted nyacks and we just couldn't work out the issues with that one so they sent me a replacement because of course these things have a warranty and you would think you know it was only a couple weeks old they would send out a new vpos touch to put in the machine no they sent this one it's like bouncing around in a box it was dirty honestly they said it was remanufactured whatever it looked like somebody had mailed it into them because it wasn't working like it was a return and they didn't even look at it they just immediately changed the label on the box and shipped it to me i mean that's the way it looked to me when i took it out of the box i'm like what is this put it in it was able to connect but the the screen on it was fuzzy like almost like bad reception on a tv it was very hard to use the touch screen because it wouldn't register when you were trying to press the different buttons on it i'm like nah i put up with it for a month i mean it was processing sales but it was just such a lemon you know you spend 250 for a new one you want something that's new so they sent me a replacement for my replacement once again i got one you know bouncing around in a box it was dirty you would think okay you're going to remanufacture it at least clean the reader i mean don't send it to me with fingerprints all over the screen you know like somebody was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then touched the screen that's what it looked like and it was dirty and i'm like oh my god here we go again but luckily that one after i cleaned it and of course i did i did have to clean it luckily for me that one did work and it's still working on that machine right now and that's that's my best machine as far as credit card sales and sales in general right now because it's at a location where students come in in the morning at least the upperclassmen from the parking lots the student parking lots and the machines are only on in the morning until right before homeroom starts so they get their drinks before the school day starts and then they come on about 20 minutes before the end of the school day so as students are leaving they get their drinks which still you know we're still making money not as much as we did when these machines were on all all day long another issue with nyx right now is i mean they're a growing company and with that it's becoming harder and harder to get through the tech support i mean sometimes you're on hold for an hour and you can put your number in and they will call you back but sometimes it takes till the end of the day before you get a call back from them when you do get through to them they are very helpful and you know they're knowledgeable and they usually can work it through your issues unfortunately they couldn't for these two readers but um i haven't given up on them yet but i don't know if if these two new vpos touches are problematic for me and it might be the end of nyx for me and i might be looking into some cantaloupe maybe some honeydew maybe some watermelon so here's what the point-of-sale window looks like and again it's a plastic window and i drilled out a center here to put the connector cord through and then you have the four screws here it is you can see the spacer sandwiches against the back of the actual reader and i'm hoping this spacer will work with the new vpos touches unfortunately if you need one of these spacers nyx isn't selling them anymore because they discontinued this reader luckily i have to from when i had this so i'm just going to reuse it is it what the point-of-sale window looked like said thirsty on it i just put some black electrical tape on the two sides so that they didn't see part of those stickers that said thirsty i have a video on installing these spacers on youtube but it's kind of pointless now because nyx doesn't sell these spacers here's the v-plus touch here's the spacer from the emit and it is the same footprint and these holes will line up with the holes that hold this back onto the v-post touch so i'll be able to take them out put my longer screws in with this spacer and it will fit on there nice the only issue is the opening the vpos touch has this door which opens so that you can put the ribbon cable in and then you have the antenna wire that goes right there i'm going to need to drill a new hole there and then i'll have to match that up with my security plate i just won't be able to take this plastic door off they're just going to sort of you know be permanently in there and hopefully i won't have any issues and i won't have to take this apart later i won't be happy if i have to disassemble all this after i get this mounted in there i'm going to go to the shop room in the school and take the one out of the other machine and just do both of these at the same time because this is gonna this is gonna really require some some heavy duty modifications [Music] [Music] [Music] so push through the front my black tape cover over the window and it should look pretty good so let's do the other one and then we'll take them down there and reinstall [Music] [Music] [Music] we got the dollar bill acceptor and the credit card reader mounted now everything is good and tight the two wires are coming right behind the bill acceptor where the stacker goes there's enough play in there i'm going to come out and go this way i just have to put the recycler module back in let's go straight in and clicks and then this plugs up into the side of the bill acceptor and then this has two connectors one is for the coin mech which is right here this one which comes from the bill acceptor is only going to hook up to this port here and then this is going to hook up to your control board which is right down here and it will only go one way clicks in then i have the antenna which i'm going to keep inside the machine i'm going to stick it through one of these side ports bring it up where the lights are and right up in the top center of the machine is where that'll go and then you have your dmx socket here which you can go up to that look at that somebody pay what a five that's what i like to see everything looks good right now i'm going to power it up and see how it looks and now that i'm done i can pull off this protective cover and there it's showing the displays well i'm going to throw this one in the other g3 machine and then i'll be done for today [Music] so i got the two powered up and they're looking great it's just as well that the old ones went bad at the same time because now i have matching vpos touches and hopefully this will lead to more sales because it is very attractive and i'm expecting they will work better than the old ones did one nice thing about these vpos touches is you can go into the menu right from the front of them you can go to terminal info check out the strength from the cell tower 21 is really good and i checked both of them and they're both at that even though the antennas are on the inside you can also go into technician mode and type in your password and then reset the cache box or say that you filled the machine so that all the products show full when you're in the app if you see here these spacers really look like a good match and it syncs up real nice even though they weren't made for this now this worked for me but honestly if you're putting a credit card reader an ix credit card reader on g3 machine i don't suggest putting it in the point-of-sale window like i did because you can't get these spacers and it really is a lot of work to modify everything to get it in there so your best bet would just be to put it on the plexiglass front and just have it there that's what most vendors are doing now before these two will work i know it looks like they're they're operational now if i tried to run a credit card sale it would say transaction canceled because i haven't synced these to my account yet and the only way to do that is to call niaccs and have them swap over the old machines to these machines and then they'll be operational but today is a sunday they're not open so i have to wait till tomorrow i'll do that and then i'll show you them working i got off the phone with nyack and they switched over my old credit card readers to the new ones so both of these are operational now but before i try these out i do want to say a couple more things about credit card readers first of all you have to be careful if you buy used or old equipment because you really want your equipment to be future ready at least 4g you want to get 4g equipment if you buy a used one on ebay it might be a 2g unit or a 3g unit and just like cell phones that technology gets outdated and you can no longer connect to the cell phone towers also with old equipment it might be stolen and it might be in somebody else's name and in order to transfer it to your account you have to get the person whose name the equipment is in to transfer it over to you and if it was stolen that just wouldn't happen so you do have to be careful with old equipment i prefer to buy new equipment second thing is contracts service contracts some credit card reader companies require you to sign up for a year of service nyx doesn't do that though you can cancel your nyx account at any time of course you'd be stuck with the equipment but at least you wouldn't have to pay the monthly fees and the final thing i do want to mention is two-tier pricing some vendors to make up the added expense of running credit card readers they have two separate prices meaning if you pay in cash you get a discount maybe it's only 90 cents for a drink if you pay in cash and it's a dollar if you pay in credit card you just have to be careful how you word that on your machine credit card companies will not allow you to say an extra 10 cent charge if you pay by credit card because they don't want it to sound like a disadvantage if you're paying by credit card so it has to be worded that the actual price is a dollar ten there's a cash discount if you pay by cash for of 10 cents and it's only a dollar if you word it that way it's okay so that is an option too i personally i don't like doing that i just want the price to be the same whether the customer pays in cash or they pay in credit well i think it's time to try these out we're going to do is going to have a little race i'm bringing in kyle you might remember him from some other episodes and i'm bringing in isaac one of kyle's classmates and isaac is going to do a bend on this machine and kyle's going to do a vent on this machine with their credit cards and whoever can process the sale the first you know actually pulls out their drink the first will get a dollar coin to basically give them their drink for free unless they buy something really expensive but if they buy something for a dollar they'll be set so i'm going to step out of here i'm going to count down from three and we'll see which one bends the quickest in three two one go kyle did the swipe isaac is trying to put in the chip oh kyle's is already bending oh my god it's already out he got a crush isaac is still approving but now it's processing and there is the drink good job good second place but here we go the dollar coin goes to kyle [Music] and as we can see both uh credit card readers are working and hopefully it will lead to more sales for me and what do we always say at the end of a video fellas happy vending man [Music] [Music] decline

Channel: Happy Vending

Views: 62,739

Keywords: nayax, cantaloupe, royal vendors, dixie narco, crane, vending machines, usa technologies, giii, vendo, coke, pepsi

Id: 8AAjNrMf1nQ

Length: 34min 38sec (2078 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022