Consider a Spare Terminal

By John Robinson

Thank one of my merchants for this suggestion.

If you’re a brick-n-mortar business, and you’re using terminals to run your credit card transactions, you may have experienced the discomfort of a terminal dying. You may have needed to funnel large numbers of customers to other cash lanes, causing gridlock at your registers and annoying both your employees and your customers. Or, God forbid, you only had the one terminal and now you’re stuck with no easy way to do business.

Having an extra terminal is such a simple way to avoid those problems.

Now, obviously, there are a few things to know beforehand.

First, if you’re leasing your terminals (which Robb and I DO NOT recommend), the month-over-month cost of a terminal you’re not using probably isn’t worth it. (Again, don’t lease terminals unless you absolutely have to. Good terminals can be had for under $300, whereas a lease will be roughly $20/month or more for years on end.)

Second, you just might not have a couple hundred dollars lying around to get the spare. No biggie. But when you can afford it, seriously consider it.

Third, there’s usually a fee to swap a broken terminal for a new “spare”…but it’s usually much less than a new terminal without the trade in.

Here’s proof of that merchant’s foresight: They’re a big performing arts theater that has eight terminals. Six are for ticket windows that get flooded right before a performance. One is for orders taken in the back office. And the last one is a spare. My contact mentioned they’ve always kept a spare because losing any of those terminals creates a huge backup at the ticket windows and has even delayed performances.

After nearly a year, I received a call one day saying, “John, we need to swap out a terminal. We’re using our spare.” Two days later they had a brand new “spare” that cost only 1/3 of the original terminal’s price (we honored the broken one as a trade-in), and they never missed a beat in their processing.

Don’t you love happy endings?

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