Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android, and iPad along with the flexibility to accept credit card payments anywhere, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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Verifone Point
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Verifone Point is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as payment simplicity and flexible service.
Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.
VeriFone Point definitely knows the VeriFone payment hardware and support tools. They work with many businesses using this hardware, so their remote management tools are thoroughly capable of handling this hardware. This allows them to meet the needs of a small deployment, maybe 20 terminals or fewer. We quickly found out that we would have been better off setting up our own tools and staff to support our deployment of VeriFone hardware. Based on the number of terminals we have in use, our geographical span, and hours of operation, we need to address issues more quickly and personally than VeriFone Point is able to. While they are responsive, their tier I support is pretty generic and mostly assists with power cycling.
Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly).
Simple setup.
Generally uncomplicated pricing.
Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider.
Knowledge and experience: Point supports many businesses with many VeriFone terminals throughout the country. Therefore, they have much experience with the hardware.
Availability: When calling for support, it is rare to not get a response from a human. Some calls are answered after only minutes of hold time, others can take much longer, but a human is almost always available.
Bureaucracy: Since this is the payment industry and a very large company, they move slower than an iceberg with most projects, including ordering new terminals or adding new features.
Availability of project support: Aside hardware troubleshooting, it often feels very difficult to get help from Point support for things like opening a new location, adding a feature, or making other changes requiring any level of planning.
Inconsistent support staff: One issue may be handled very differently by different support staff. We often work with somebody for hours on one issue only to call back later and have the same issue solved in minutes by a different person.
I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
Once set up, Square POS is very easy to use. I feel it is a little too easy. Many other solutions have some layer of complexity to them but Square POS is pretty straightforward and this makes it the ideal POS solution in my opinion. If a solution can remove the barriers to use and allow end users to get on with their tasks without being slowed down, then it is a winner. This is what we were able to achieve with Square POS.
An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.
We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with Authorize.Net. It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.
We started using VeriFone Point when we switched from software-based credit card processing to VeriFone payment software. With our previous software system, we had a similar experience with support to what we have experienced with VeriFone Point. Support for payment industry tools tends to be excessively pragmatic, to the point where they ignore symptom clues while having us power cycle hardware for the fifth time.
The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month.
We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals.
Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space.
