Brick and Mortar Point of Sale POS and Virtual Terminal

[mkp007]

We are in need of finding an easy way to provide a Brick & Mortar Store Point of Sales interface for E-Junkie. One way this could work really well is a discrete button in the cart that will take you to Paypals Virtual terminal in the same way the PayPal button takes a customer to PayPal for checkout. Instead, the employee operating the register would enter the customer info. Processing credit cards this was is very simple. All you need is a Dell MagneSafeâ„¢ Mini card reader. You can add other customer info such as name, email and phone. I realize that Virtual Terminal may not work the same way as the PayPal payment button but is worth looking into.





This forum post addresses the same question:



http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60449





virtual terminal guide doesn't mention this type of payment process.

https://cms.paypal.com/cmscontent/US/en_US/files/developer/VirtualTerminal_Guide_us.pdf

[E-junkie_Guru]

About all we could suggest is having your clerk simply place an online cart order and fill out the checkout screen on the customer's behalf. You may want to set up a special page on your site where you'd place cart buttons for all your products in a table or list for quick order entry by staff. You could also just create a dummy product in E-junkie with "Let buyer edit price" enabled, so your clerk would add that item to a cart, enter the payment total as the "price", and proceed to checkout. There may be some sort of card-reader application you could use to capture the card-swipe data for easy copy-paste into the checkout screen.



If you don't need to build a cart order to be processed after payment by E-junkie, but rather simply need to process card payments for any arbitrary payment amount, you could use PayPal Pro's Virtual Terminal for that directly without going through the E-junkie cart at all; there may be applications you could use as a "front end" for Virtual Terminal in parallel to using E-junkie for online orders, but we aren't familiar with any in particular as that doesn't involve our service.

[mkp007]

I get the impression that E-Junkie is incapable of adding any new capability and are only offering very basic support for the current platform. Your comments above were only reiterating E-Junkies current capability. When you state that this need I have "doesn't involve our service" it solidifies my assumption that your business is not advancing.



"you could use PayPal Pro's Virtual Terminal for that directly without going through the E-junkie cart at all" Really! Of course it does. I have an app for my iphone and I have been doing this for several years. However, it does not route the order information the same way so no E-Junkie email, inventory tracking, pasting of order info into my excel program, etc.



Annoyed.

[mkp007]

Ok, how about a "Pay by Cash" option? A discrete button in the shopping cart maybe. Takes you to a checkout screen where all input is optional. How hard would this be to implement?

[E-junkie_Guru]

About all we could suggest along those lines would be having a secret discount code for 100% off the Item Total, so your sales clerk could enter that code in your cart to enable our Free Checkout:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/free-checkout.htm



E-junkie is deliberately positioned as a very simple, basic e-commerce service for very simple, basic needs to handle online orders. It may simply be that your needs have outgrown what E-junkie can reasonably do, so if we've become the wrong tool for your job, you may be better served by a more full-featured e-commerce package that includes in-person POS functionality for your physical store.



Right now, Development has their hands full just keeping up with our growth, making improvements to our stability and performance, and working on the long-delayed new Admin project; once the new Admin is ready, we'll be able to tackle implementation of popularly-requested new features and functionality on the wishlist, so rarely-requested features such as adding POS functions would be unlikely to make the cut anytime soon. This post explains our development strategy and constraints in more detail:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/4079#post14073