Gift Cards

RMS has Gift cards options built in it is called Vouchers. You issue them it tracks them. Doesn't go anywhere.

In the voucher system RMS will keep track of exactly what amount is left on the voucher.

We decided not to use the voucher system but made a tender type labeled "gift certificates". RMS doesn't keep up with what is left on each certificate but the money stays locally. I also serialized the certificates. The only downfall I can find, is upon tendering RMS does not ask for the serial number; however the voucher option does I believe.

have your gift cards made by company x (with mag stripe/encoding with the voucher number and the voucher number printer on the gift card) and use them with the built in voucher feature. The gift card itself does not transfer money, it is just a vessel for the voucher number to reside.

There is no need for an addiaional processor to be used with a gift card.

Don't use mag stipe cards, barcode them. The terminals in barcodes will cause issues when trying to create new voucher cards. Barcodes work best.

This thread has great info - thanks! But I'm not sure why you shouldn't use mag stripes? It looks to me like the printer will encode them for me with whatever range of serial numbers I want - then all the terminal has to do is read them....

No, by terminal i mean the characters that are always placed at the beginning and end of a mag stripe. If you swipe a credit card into Notepad, it will have certain characters at the beginning and end of the data. So if you want to have a range of voucher serial numbers from, for example 10000 to 15000, in the database they'd have to contain the terminal characters embedded into the serial number. That means you can't auto-generate them using RMS. You'd have to add them one by one. Just trust me on this one. Use barcoded gift cards, it will save you TONS of headahces!

Gary,

I would suggest you call Mercury and eliminate your fears of them holding your money. As this is not the case. I have setup Mercury with gift cards at a couple of stores and they work great. Not to mention they have the most flexible solution you can find. Credit Cards, Debit Cards, EBT, Gift Cards. The only catch is you have to buy the actual cards from them. But you might as well hear it from the horses mouth, so give them a call.

Rob

Umm... I think you stepped on your toes without realizing it.

Gift cards are defined as vouchers. A tender called gift card is also used. You will be prompted to serialize the card when you sell one and enter that serial number when you tender it.

So why wouldn't you use this as designed? Simple and it works. You can even cancel a lost card and reissue a new one for the remaining value. And you can assign one Item Lookup Code to handle all gift cards, no matter what their value. Check off the option to prompt for price at POS.

RMS does > In the voucher system RMS will keep track of exactly what amount is left on

Thanks, Rob - I appreciate your candor - I'll definitely speak to Mercury on Monday - I don't yet have merchant account(s) - as I'm trying to find the right POS first. I'm hoping that a local MS business partner will contact me in the next couple of business days - I tell you, I got so sick of hearing "yes, we know you're a small business, but you should invest in your future - what's $35,000 in the scope of things...."

I'm bett> Gary,

Gary,

Print your own gift cards using Avery business card stock and the free Label Pro software available for download from Avery at avery.com. You can print serialized barcodes using this software - no need for mag stripes. Mag stripe and barcode both return the same thing - a number string. You can even print the barcodes on one side and turn it around and print the gift card info on the other side. Put the value on the face of the gift card and set the price in inventory , or leave a place to write the amount on the gift card and have no price on the gift card item and set RMS to require the gift card price to be entered when one is sold. Using RMS's vouchering system, a cashier can call up the remaining balance on a gift card Shft Ctl F3 and scanning it, and if a customer questions the balance, can show a window with the original sale and each time the the card was used, including drilling down to the image of each receipt.

So, $10 for Avery Business Card Stock and track in RMS, or pay a CC company $1,000 for cards and tracking.

Rick

Or spend $250 for 500 cards (choosing from 8 different designs) from Mercury Payments, pay $0 for tracking, have online reporting system, get 50 tent cards and get a Promotional acrylic display. But most of all you will then have a solution that is going to make a great impression to your customers. If you wanted to spend $1000.00 or $0.99/1000 cards, you could customize your gift cards your way.

Rob

If you think your customers might come in the door without the intention of buying a gift card and be enticed by plastic ones in a fancy display to the extent that it'll give you the income to offset the additional expense, then you'll perceive value there and it's certainly your choice. But if you think they probably already have the intention when they come in the door, then you can design a fine card with the Avery label designer and also a folded card to put it in, all personalized with your own layout, graphics, logo and type to reflect your business, and manage the cards and balances easily with RMS. I'm assuming Mercury has a choice of generic card designs with fireworks or balloons to choose from.

About a month ago I switched a client from another CC provider to better rates with Global Payments (which is the processor Mercury uses by the way). The client was using a third party Gift Card provider - Transaction Payment Systems (TPS). The gift cards were swiped through a terminal and TPS managed their balances. When I emailed TPS and asked for a printout or file of the outstanding Gift Cards and their balances so I could load them into RMS to begin processing them through RMS, they told me that it would require a lot of programming and time and would cost in excess of $500. This information should be free. Those of you who know databases will recognize this as an extortion attemp by TPS. You'd be hard pressed to come up with a simpler database design than a gift card database, and the report I was asking for would be simple to do - Gift Card#, Balance. It's still not resolved. But this is what you can unexpectedly run into. With RMS, it's all internal, and you control it. You're not at the mercy of another provider. And with RMS, the cashier can immediately show a customer a history of their card including an image of the receipt for each transaction against it.

If you sign up with Mercury and also buy their gift cards and tracking, and then subsequently decide to switch providers for any reason, what do you do about all your customers outstanding gift cards if Mercury's managing them. Can the new provider take them on, or are you stuck with Mercury? If you do gift cards through RMS, you don't have to worry about this eventuality.

Also, when you buy gift cards from Mercury or other online processor, you can't use them if you later want to switch to RMS because they're encoded with something like a semicolon before the number and some other character after. Swipe one in Notepad and you'll see what I mean. RMS can't strip these characters out when read so you'd need to toss them. So if there's any chance you'll switch providers at some point, you could run into problems.

Rob, you should mention that you're a reseller for Mercury.

Rick Brown

"Once bitten, twice shy." To me it sounds like you have been soured by a company trying to hose you for more money. Which unfortunately happens in our free market society, by unscroupulous individuals.

Regarding reporting on gift cards and any other payments made through Mercury, that is all free and all done on the web. These are just a few of the 'Gift Card Reports' that can be run through there portal: Transaction Summary: Sections for Issues, Sales, Returns, Deactivations, Declined Cards, totals only Transaction Details: Same as Transaction Summary, but with lines for each issue, sale, return, etc. Transactions by Time: All transactions occurring at a location in date/time order Gift Card Liability: Shows all outstanding cards with amounts and total liability Cards in Circulation: Summary of Active, Deactivated and Expired Cards Single Card Details: Detailed history of transactions on a particular card Cross Store Summary: Other stores accepting your cards, and cards you redeemed for other stores Cross Store Details: Same as above, but showing each cross store transaction You can also export the information out into a file, if desired. Not to mention they have a tonne of other reports for Credit and Debit processing

Obviously choosing a payment processor is not just as simply as finding the company that has the most bells and whistles. It comes done to PRICE, what you NEED out a payment processor and what you WANT. I know Mercury is not the least expensive but they do have competitive prices. They have what you need if you are looking for Credit Card, Debit Card, EBT, Check Processing and reporting and if you need that solution to be integrated into MS POS. Then they also have what you want want such has a Gift Cards.

If you are just looking for the cheapest rates, then Mercury is not for you or if you are the type of individual who hops around from processor to processor then again Mercury is not for you. But if you want an entire solution that is reasonably priced and integrated into your MS POS then I would stronly recommend Mercury for there entire package and the ease of installation.

And yes Rick I am a reseller for Mercury, but I am not here to sell Mercury too anyone. I sell Mercury to MY MS POS clients, if they choose to take it, after I have given them all the information and no not everyone decides to go with Mercury, I leave that decision up to the client. If anyone wants Mercury Payments or wants to talk to them, call them directly, as I suggested to Gary (the original poster) to do initially.

I have not written this to discredit what you have wrote Rick, you made some good points that people need to take into consideration. I wrote this post so that people know the whole truth. That is what we do as consultants, we need to stay open minded for the sake of our clients, providing them with the best possible solution that fit there entire POS needs.

Rob

Rick,

I am a Mercury reseller too. I echo Rob's remarks as well. So far, in my opinion, it is the best solution for merchants who are looking for a total solution that is easy to implement and manage. It is probably not the solution for somebody just shopping price. But, even if you are just shopping price, Mercury does not require a contract so if the merchant wants to go to another merchant vendor thay can without penalties.

But, what sold me on Mercury was the ease of implementation. There are no banks to fight with. No merchant services to try and pry information out of. There is one point of contact, and that is it. The most painful part of implementing a point of sale solution in my experience is the merchant solution (outside of OPOS). If the retailer does not have a good banker who actually knows what they are doing, then it falls to us (RMS resellers) to call the bank, call merchant services, call whomever we can to get the information needed to input into RMS to make the whole thing work.

Mercury has taken all of the complexity out of the setup, and saves the retailer a lot of money by making the installation and setup a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

Amy

Let's limit this to the threads subject, Gift Cards. (I'm sure Mercury is a good solution for CC's and DC's and especially for clients who need to accept EBT as is TPIsoft's solution, and with their solution you can choose your processor).

But I can't conceive of why you'd sell a client on a 3rd party Gift Card processor over RMS (unless the client wants the cards to be used at multiple stores) other than that Mercury pays you a monthly commission to do so. I've already laid out the reasons. Why pay a premium for an unnecessary service and give up control of a process that can easily be handled in RMS?

Rick Brown

Multiple stores is the only reason I'd recommend the Mercury gift card solution.

Very interesting discussion - thanks for all the answers.

I decided to go with Mercury as my processor, and will be using their gift card solution as well. I spent quite a bit of time on the phone with the rep at Mercury and was very pleased with their level of service.

Their gift cards, interestingly enough, are incredibly easy to manage and report on via the web. In addition, if I ever want to bring the GC processing "in-house," it's very simple to do. There are standard reports which would allow me to pull, in delimited mode, if I wish, all cards with outstanding balances, the card numbers and the balance information, all ready for import into whatever system I wish to put it into.

I went with Mercury for the GC's because they have about the best price for fully-customized cards. I appreciate the coments about creating GC's out of card stock, but that's not the type of branding I want to exhibit. Plastic cards are much more likely to get kept and reloaded, IMHO.

Again, thanks everyone.

"Amy Luby" wrote: