Best EFTPOS machine Australia

So you’re looking for the best EFTPOS machine Australia has to offer. Here’s the honest answer, and I’m going to give it to you before anything else: there isn’t one. A lot of terminals look the same, and a lot of them are the same. What actually separates a good one from a bad one is the payment application running on it — and, if you’re integrated, whose integration is sitting behind it.

It’s like having an app on your iPhone. If one app is better than another, it doesn’t matter how good your phone is. One’s just going to be better than the other, isn’t it?

So the real question isn’t “what’s the best EFTPOS terminal”. It’s “what’s the best one for me” — and that depends on what you’re plugging it into, who supports it, and what your Wi-Fi is like.

Let me take you through how the market got to where it is, because it explains a lot.

How we got here

Four years ago you were mostly looking at the old-style terminals. A lot of them were Linux based.

The most popular of the lot — I used to call it the Boeing 747 of the terminal world, because it just keeps going on and on and on, doesn’t break, totally reliable — was the Ingenico Move 5000. Ingenico’s a ginormous company. NAB had it, Commonwealth had it, a bunch of banks had this thing.

No bells and whistles. Small screen — big for its day, but nothing fancy. Buttons, not a touchscreen. And it worked.

What you’ve been seeing since is a terminal update requirement working its way through the market — the banks bringing the old ones in and rolling new ones out.

Part of that is a compliance obligation; they don’t have a choice about it. But part of it is just age. The Move 5000 came out around 2012. That’s a long innings for a piece of hardware that gets dropped on a tiled floor twice a week.

And then Square and Zeller turned up with their funky-looking big white screens — Android underneath, iPhone-ish to look at, genuinely chic bits of kit. The banks felt they needed to get in on that.

Where we are now: the smart terminal

We’re in what I’d call the smart terminal phase, and there are a couple of big Android players in it.

You’ve still got the old guard — Ingenico and Verifone — and they’re still fairly big in the space. But then some new ones came along.

The main one is PAX. Nigel Lovell, who runs PAX in Australia and helped set the business up here, is a brilliant CEO, and I’ll declare I’ve consulted for them. PAX came into the market at a good price and with really nice, easy integration capability.

So suddenly people can build apps on the terminal. And a lot of merchants go: what do I need an app on a payment terminal for?

Here’s what for. If you can put the point of sale on the device, you don’t need Linkly or another middleware operator sitting in between — and that middleware can be expensive.

So that’s one reason: cost.

The other is convenience. Take pay-at-table, which I’ve gone into in compare EFTPOS fees and costs. If your point of sale is on the terminal and running to the cloud rather than a box on-premise, you can skip from table to table to table, take payments the whole way, and never walk back to the pay station. These new Android terminals are what allowed that to happen.

The catch: getting the integration guides and the API to integrate into the payment application on the device is like pulling teeth. Very, very hard. Tyro do it quite well. A lot of the others do it poorly — which is a shame, because if they did it properly I reckon you’d see a lot more innovation in this market.

So what actually makes a machine good?

The best machine is a machine that works. That’s it.

One that doesn’t drop out. One that holds a Wi-Fi connection properly — that matters more than people think.

After that it’s about what your business actually needs:

• Buttons. Say you’ve got a cafe next to the blind institute. You probably want physical buttons on that terminal, so a customer can feel their way through paying and entering a PIN. Doesn’t apply to everyone. Matters enormously to some.
• Form factor. Countertop, standalone, mobile — they’re all different animals.
• Robustness. Do you need an outdoor, IP67-rated unit? Most people don’t. Some absolutely do.

So I’m going to say it plainly: there is no best terminal in the market. The PAX A920 Pro is a great terminal. So is the PAX A910S. But a lot of what makes it great is the software behind it — and in PAX’s case the software provider is often not PAX. PAX have their own payment application, but plenty of people build their own.

That’s where the real differentiation is. Not the box. The payment application.

The software is the product

Then you’ve got companies like Payter — Dutch, unattended specialists — who have a really great API. We work with them to bring those solutions into Australia.

Here’s a live example. We’ve got car wash software. I can use the app, turn on a bay, the lot, because it’s really just connecting to the terminal. And in the unattended deals we’ve done, the terminal mattered — but the biggest difference wasn’t the terminal. It was the software behind it.

And it wasn’t about which box it was — the Quest UT430, the PAX IM30, any of them. It was the software behind them.

Take refunds. Quest can’t do unattended refunds — can’t trigger a refund remotely by API. That was a real problem for a car park client of ours. There are ways around it, unmatched refunds through card-not-present channels and so on, but they wanted the refund matched to the original transaction wherever possible, to avoid chargebacks and complications. You can get around it. It just creates more work and more pain.

And at the enterprise end you’ve got the likes of Quest Payment Systems and DataMesh. These are third-party companies playing at a different level: they’ve built their own payment application, put it on their own terminals, and then gone and certified that with a number of banks — Quest especially.

Think about what that actually buys you. The application is theirs, not the bank’s, so the behaviour doesn’t change underneath you every time the bank updates something. And because it’s certified with several banks, the terminal isn’t welded to one of them.

That is a genuinely different proposition to buying whatever your bank hands you. It’s also why the answer here is market for market. What’s best for a cafe is not what’s best for a car park, and neither is what’s best for a five-hundred-store retailer.

If your terminal “doesn’t work”, check your Wi-Fi first

Standalone terminals are pretty basic, and I’ll say it: most standalone terminals are much the same. Maybe some difference in Wi-Fi capability and how good the signal catching is. That’s about the size of it.

So when someone tells me their terminal doesn’t work very well, the first thing I’m looking at is their Wi-Fi. What’s your Wi-Fi like, mate?

A car without petrol doesn’t run well. It doesn’t run at all. A car without oil starts conking. Same with a terminal: if you haven’t got good Wi-Fi, your terminal is not going to run well.

We had a client with fourteen pubs and shocking Wi-Fi. He said to me, mate, I don’t care, you need to make it work. And I said: I can’t make a car run without petrol, and I can’t make a terminal run on shit Wi-Fi. Upgrade your Wi-Fi or you’ll be dealing with this forever.

So you’ve got to get real too. Don’t automatically blame the device. You need the right setup around it. The merchant isn’t always right — sometimes the merchant is wrong, and there has to be a bit of back and forward.

Integrated terminals: the integration is the product

Integrated terminals always seem to be a problem. Not always — but so often, the integration is where it goes wrong.

And when it does, everyone looks at the bank and the reseller. What’s going wrong? Why isn’t this working?

Wrong number. Ring your point of sale company.

Your point of sale company did the integration. If you’ve got MX51, Linkly, Tyro, whoever — the middleware has to get it running, sure, but it is your POS provider’s job to integrate it properly. Linkly says: here’s the SDK, go and integrate. The point of sale company takes it, and some of them do it poorly and never update it.

Some do Linkly really well, by the way. Linkly is a good company and I don’t blame them for these integrations. I get fewer complaints about Tyro integrations than Linkly ones, and I’d say Tyro’s integration is genuinely strong — but that’s a comparison of how well the POS companies have done the work either side.

So don’t ring Linkly. Don’t ring the bank and have a whinge. Don’t ring your reseller. Ring the point of sale company. They’re the ones who did it, they’re the ones who should know, and they love to pass the buck.

Don’t let them pass the buck. And if the integration is bad and they’re still passing it, change point of sale — because that tells you everything about that company.

So what’s “best” when you’re integrated? Same answer again: the integration that works. Is the Linkly integration good? Does it hold up under load on a Friday night? Do you have to use a different integration to get what you need? Those are the questions. The colour of the terminal is not.

And while you’re at it: is your point of sale still a server sitting on a rack in your bloody storeroom? Where every time something goes wrong somebody has to physically come out and look at it? I’m done with that. Move to the cloud.

If you’re an enterprise, do not ask your bank

I’ll be blunt about this one.

If you’re an enterprise client, do not go to your bank and ask what the best terminal is. They’re going to sell you their own terminal and nothing else. They’re not going to advise you on anything else. And the major banks in particular stock hardly any options — there are a lot of options out there if you look around, and your bank is not where you’ll find them.

Here’s the trap, and I’ve watched it happen.

You’ve got five hundred stores. You get a great deal from a bank, terminals and all, and everyone’s happy. Then a year or two later you go looking for balance sheet funding. Another bank comes to the table, participates in that, and says: mate, I’m not giving you this price unless we get your EFTPOS facilities as well.

Now you’ve got to move five hundred terminals. Swapping out five hundred devices across five hundred sites, re-integrating every one of them to the point of sale, retraining the staff — that is a real effort for a big organisation. It’s a pain in the arse. And the bank you’re leaving knows it, which is exactly why they gave you the terminals in the first place.

That’s not a hardware problem. That’s a lock-in problem wearing a hardware costume.

Yet there are solutions where you can change banks and never touch the terminal. So whenever I talk to enterprise clients, the whole conversation is about reducing the barrier to exit.

Do a single integration. Your own point of sale, in the cloud or on the device. Skip the Linkly fee, skip the middleware fee. Get an agnostic third-party terminal provider running an agnostic payment application. Spend the money once and do it properly, because you only do it once.

Then you can go from bank to bank to bank to bank and never swap a terminal. Not once.

And then you get to squeeze the bank. Every renewal, forever, because walking away costs you a phone call instead of a project. There are more options out there than your bank will ever show you — you just have to know where they are.

That’s not a terminal decision. That’s an architecture decision, and it’s worth more than any rate you’ll negotiate.

Tap on mobile

Tap on mobile is really tap on Android. Any Android device with an NFC chip and you’re good to go.

What you can’t do is run it in a fully unattended environment. You can run it in a kiosk — but note that a kiosk is not unattended, it’s classified as semi-unattended, and that distinction decides what you’re allowed to deploy. Plenty of people get that wrong.

For a lot of merchants it’s a real option, and worth asking about before you go buying hardware you don’t need.

Unattended

For unattended, the question is the same one again: what do you actually need?

Do you want a cheap, no-frills terminal? Or do you need the software behind it to do things — unattended refunds, for instance?

Do you need IP67? Do you need it so strong that if a bunch of rascals turn up with baseball bats it still works the next morning? The Quest UT430 — if you live in Melbourne you’ll have seen them on the transport network — is that kind of machine. You could set off a bloody nuclear bomb next to it and it’d still be taking payments.

But it costs money. It’s expensive. So you’d never put one in a vending machine, because a vending machine does very few transactions and the whole game there is getting the hardware cost down.

Whereas if you’re running a car park, or anything doing a lot of transactions on a single machine, you don’t much care that the machine is cheap. You want one that works and doesn’t break.

So what’s the best EFTPOS machine in Australia?

The one that works for you.

If you’re a standard merchant running standalone, almost any of them will do — get your Wi-Fi right and stop worrying about it. If you’re integrated, the machine matters far less than whose integration is behind it. If you’re unattended, it’s about features and robustness, not brand. And if you’re enterprise, the real decision isn’t the terminal at all, it’s whether you’ve built yourself the ability to walk.

And how do you know which one is right for you? Give us a call. That’s how you know.