Summer travel is here: How a smart terminal can heat up your business.

Combine a rise in temperatures with an easing of a pandemic that has kept people locked down for more than a year, and what you have is the potential for a major influx of customers at your retail or restaurant business. Don’t be caught unprepared when the onslaught of money-carrying consumers hits your shop, eatery, or website. Bring a smart terminal on board to optimize your business’s performance and turn one-time visitors into loyal customers.

Smart terminals can help you accept more payment methods.

Modern customers expect a lot more of a merchant than simply being allowed to complete their transactions. Nowadays, they demand a complete shopping experience, including targeted product recommendations, an array of frictionless payment choices, and ongoing personalized contact. You might be wondering how you and your staff can possibly accommodate these requests. After all, no matter how important your buyers are, you have a busy retail operation to run, products to order, and staff to manage. Fortunately, your smart terminal contains everything it takes to streamline your operations, manage your employees, and provide buyers with the holistic relationship to you and your brand that they are looking for.

To accommodate buyers’ desire for flexibility, your smart terminal is equipped to accept multiple payment methods. These include debit and credit cards, cash, and even recurring subscription payments, an option that works particularly well for certain business models and product offerings.

Modern smart terminals are also likely to be outfitted with near-field communication (NFC) technology, which allows for contactless payments. Now that more and more shoppers are choosing to buy using “smart” credit cards, phones, and wearables, it’s more important than ever that your checkout includes a contactless NFC reader. Your customers may then simply place their card or device within a few inches of your reader. Within seconds, every piece of relevant information is transmitted, and the transaction is either accepted or declined. Best of all, certified, point-to-point encryption and tokenization make the process secure. In an era when few customers carry large amounts of cash (and many don’t even bring their physical credit or debit cards), it’s in your business’s best interests to be flexible and responsive by providing contactless buying options via a smart terminal.

Considering that contactless payments and the digital wallets associated with them are gaining in popularity with each passing year, it behooves any savvy business owner to integrate smart terminal technology into their operations as soon as possible. The pandemic-related focus on hygiene only makes this priority more pressing and relevant.

Smart terminals can help manage inventory swings during summer or year-round. 

During this more relaxed time of year, it can be challenging to predict how well even your most popular items will sell. Customers whom you count on during most months may be away on vacation. At the same time, there might well be a wave of patrons who have never entered your doors until now. Making preparations in advance to take these fluctuations into account is an imperfect science at best. However, a smart terminal can certainly increase your odds of success both this summer season and in future ones.

The key lies in a smart terminal’s automated capabilities. Without difficulty, you can use its payments software to build and maintain customer and product databases that keep track of who you serve and what they buy. Once you have access to actionable reports that detail your sales, you’ll be in a much better position to forecast your future needs and streamline the accurate re-ordering of stock. Your smart terminal can help you to avoid one of the worst nightmares of any retailer: Running out of an item that is in high demand. It’s also capable of sending you alerts that can jog your memory in plenty of time to purchase items that may be running low before your shelves are bare.

Smart terminals help with staffing during summer.

When the sun shines bright and the temperatures heat up, most of us want to take a few days off. Your employees are no exception. Considering that only one in 10 will elect to bypass a summer vacation in favor of staying on the job, this time of year presents you with some staffing obstacles that your smart terminal integrations can help to address.

Fortunately, you may be able to pad your staff count with temporary help from the ranks of high school and college students who are recently liberated from their studies and in search of summer cash. Your smart terminal’s employee management capabilities can be vital in assisting you with the process of hiring staff and building your schedule. It will also enhance your ability to provide positive reinforcement for team members who are excelling (and additional training for those who struggle). This enhanced level of accountability promotes an atmosphere of healthy competition that can lead to more robust sales.

Furthermore, your payments software should provide an easy and highly trackable way for workers to clock in and out. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth or handwritten bulletin board announcements, you can send personalized emails each week that specify the dates and times when each person is expected to be at your workplace. You’ll also want to ensure that your smart terminal integrates smoothly with your accounting software, making payroll a breeze.