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POS Card Reader compatibility with Wave Payments
onsombal
Member Posts: 2
Are there any POS Magnetic Reader Swipers that are compatible with the Wave Invoice form? i.e. — is the a POS card reader that will auto-fill the wave invoice payment fields?
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Hi @onsombal! Wave doesn't integrate with any POS readers right now, but I'd love if you could tell us a little more about how you'd like to use a POS together with Wave. Generally speaking, invoices are used for Accounts Receivable, ie money your clients owe you, whereas POS systems would be used for immediate sales.
Hey @Jerrod! Thanks for your input here! At present, Wave still does not have plans to integrate with POS card readers, but your context around your current situation is great to have. We appreciate it!
+1 to the swiper. Think like the paypal or square type devices but tied to the wave account. I am an IT consultant but do a lot of break fix work that i like to be paid on at delivery. I too use a paypal swiper but believe it would be much more cohesive and better for tracking purposes to have it happen in wave instead. Think about it. You could be missing out on a revenue stream sleeping on this idea.
Hwy @Bryan092785 and welcome to Wave's Community Forum! Thanks for sounding off on the feature idea around a POS Swiper! While Wave does specialize in software, hardware is slightly outside of our current scope. In saying that, I know that the time may be considering how feasible this sort of hardware would be. I agree that as a payment processing platform, this feels like a natural next step! The one thing that I could see stalling this would be the current social climate where face to face sales are limited at the moment, however, as we readjust and potentially begin to re-climatize to more conventional face to face sales again, then this might be something that we begin exploring again.
I have clients who can't really use square or other pos applications because they provide custom services and don't have standard items or services they sell. For example an auto repair shop. There is no way they would be able to create items of every combination of how they service a car. However, they do expect payment before the customer takes their car home. Having a way to accept credit card payments right there in the shop is essential to expanding their customer base. They have picked up new clients because they accept credit cards as payment. My client will create an invoice in Wave but are currently using a square reader to accept payments only. They would love to have a card reader to accept payment on a Wave invoice so everything stays in one place.
I found this article how Square credit card readers can be integrated with other third-party apps. https://developer.squareup.com/us/en/in-person-payments.
This may be worth looking into. Wave is doing so many great things this could be something that so many other business owners would move to Wave for
Hey @mclunepivot , thanks for this thoughtful message. For transparency, Wave is focused on improving our online features rather than expanding to physical offerings like card readers. That said, we're always looking to improve our user experience, and feedback like this helps us to do just that. Thank you for sharing how this would speed up and impact your business operations, and even providing a helpful link! This is super effective communication with us. I'll be sure to pass your feedback along as a feature idea.
A card reader is the ONLY thing missing from our Wave experience. JK Towing needs the flexibility of Wave to "build" an invoice but then we punch Wave's calculated price into SQUARE because we have a card reader which takes 5 seconds to complete the purchase. This works ok for us but Wave loses out on the cc fee after providing an outstanding invoice / pricing tool. I'm not an app developer but Square states "you can now connect to Square Stand, Square Readers, and Square Terminal by integrating with our APIs and SDKs for in-person payments" and we already have the Square card readers.
Unfortunately I can’t chime in that a card reader is the only thing we’re missing from Wave, but it is certainly one.
We have a site that uses WordPress (like 35% of ALL websites) and Woocommerce (like 6.8% of the top million websites), and Wave’s integration with the two is extremely, extremely poor. We can’t use Wave for any of the credit card processing on the site, and Wave hasn’t figured out a way to sync clients, transactions, products, etc. with Woocommerce. So when we need to do invoices we have to rebuild our entire product library in Wave, which is inconceivable. (Square does this almost natively.)
In addition to wishing Wave would integrate with our website better (which would also give you a piece of all of our online purchases), we would also like to be able to swipe customer credit cards who show up at our retail location. And the previous comment referring to the coronavirus putting a damper on the economy is wildly shortsighted. Millions of businesses still have clients who have to come to them every day. You’re hearing from some right here: real estate, consulting, auto repair, towing, retail...
So if Wave isn’t doing things to accommodate e-commerce on the largest platforms in the world, and there is no development to help support those who need face-to-face transaction processing assistance - what is Wave’s focus? If it’s not online, and it’s not in person, what’s left?
How do I enter a credit card when someone calls me with their card info into waveapp?
Hey @deN4VQ , I'd suggest first adding it to their Customer profile under the Customers page. From there, you can charge their credit card moving forward in the Wave system through the invoice whenever you need to.
I am planning on doing farmer’s markets this spring and having a fast way to take credit cards would be great. But it looks like I will have to sign up for Square.
POS is the big miss for us, being a botanical garden, selling tickets and passes at the gate and gift store sales. Even with COVID it is a consistent need and we looking forward to a POS solution in wave.
However, the app does have the option for [Record Payment] where card information can be entered manually.
I would like to suggest that functionality be added that would allow users to take a picture of a credit card and have the credit card information populate into the corresponding fields.
I'll add to the support for both a card reader and WooCommerce support. We currently have two businesses. Our main business works completely remotely and invoices clients when the project is complete. Wave is perfect for us, and I'm happy to have found it: We never see our clients and the vast majority of them pay by clicking the link on the invoice. I'm in the process of switching from PayPal to Wave as our main card processor because I like the online accounting tools Wave offers. It does not hurt that Wave's fees are mostly lower than PayPal's.
Our second business combines online and in-person sales, so we need both the website integration and the card reader. Square provides both perfectly, and they are almost completely impossible in Wave. Therefore, our second business is processing all of its transactions through Square rather than Wave even though I would like to use the accounting tools for the second business. That business is pretty small right now (±$1,000/month), but we hope to grow to process six figures annually in the near future.
The one piece I would mention that I don't see in the other comments is about accessibility. PayPal's card reader requires an Internet connection to process a card. We do all our sales in rural northern New England where cell service and wifi are spotty. This handicap made us abandon PayPal for another business years ago and we have not looked back. In contrast, Square's phone app can read the card and store the information until we get back in service. We take on a small risk that the card will be declined, but at least we can make the sale. So far, people have been very honest; that risk has never been realized for us.