One of the things that's always driven me nuts about accepting credit cards in restaurants is the ridiculous amount of money that has to be paid up front to use a standard processor. For those outside the restaurant world, point of sale software traditionally needs middleware - a third-party application that bridges the gap between two places - to speak the right language to a credit card processing network. If you're a visual person, it's going to look something like this:
There are quite a few companies out there that make Middleware. The top three are IC Verify, PCCharge, and Datacap, and they don't come cheap. The datacap Net-e-Pay solution I tried to help someone with today to integrate to their existing FuturePOS installation retails for about $1800.
Now if you're in the restaurant business, right now you're probably thinking, "so what? I'll just use Mercury. It's free!" Well, nothing is really free. Being locked into a 3-year contract with no ability to shop competitors, a $300 cancellation fee, and sometimes hidden fees and higher percentages per transaction add up to quite a hefty sum over three years. Does it add up to more than the $1800 price tag over the 3-years? Probably, but almost $2000 is a pretty big price to swallow when starting a restaurant or migrating from a cash register.
So now you're probably thinking that I'm going to pitch some new radical idea to ditch that $2000 price tag, right? Try this one on for size - cut away the middleware from the equation above. What if your point of sale solution had a direct interface to the credit card processing network? No third-party software to worry about, no additional upfront cost to have your own credit card merchant provider.
Dinerware now offers a direct interface into major credit card processing networks, eliminating the need for complex middleware to interface between networks, which means that $2000 cost goes out the window. For once, free is really free...
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