Manual entry vs. Swipe on MSR

I am using a Touch Dynamics Cobra. Even though we swipe the credit cards, Point of Sale is indicating that these were manual entries. Vital / Paymentech then charges us for the addtional fees since it wasn't "swiped". The MSR is connected via PS2. So far calls to Microsoft / Paymentech / Vital haven't proved successful.

Reply to
Chris
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Chris,

I spent a year tracking down a similar problem. RMS makes the determination if a card is swiped or manual depending on certain characters it reads in the mag stripe. Occasionally a cashier will get a popup notice (can't remember exact wording) that the card number did not read correctly or the number may not be correct. If the cashier clicks OK the transaction continues and all seems well, HOWEVER the transaction processes as a manual entry. As long as the cashier clicks CANCEL and re-swipes the card the transaction will process properly as a swiped transaction.

I suspect sloppy, angled swipes may be one of the causes, were the MSR gets the NECESSARY card info, but not the swipe confirmation data. We were running a very high percentage of transactions processed as manual until we re-trained our cashiers and impressed upon them them the importance of following the correct procedure. There are ways to check how transactions were processed and if you need more information I would be happy to fill you in.

It is also important to note that if a transaction processes as manual and you do not have a hard copy imprint you will lose a chargeback!

Hope that helps,

Marc

Reply to
Marc

Marc, Thanks for the input.

I found out that the card reader was reading track 1 & track 2 on the credit cards. Microsoft POS should be set to read track 2 only. I made that change via a utility program for the reader and everything is now being recognized as being swiped.

Reply to
Chris

Glad you solved your problem. I was not clear that you are using Microsoft POS.

Just to clarify for anyone else with similar issues, the problem I described is with RMS not POS.

Marc

Reply to
Marc

Hi,

I am having the same problem in my RMS custom add-on. I believe I could solve it if I could get the raw data from track 2. The problem is, that even when I set the DecodeData property to false, I still get the decoded data, not raw. Is there any other way how to get the raw data or maybe to get the raw data back from the decoded?

Thank you for your help.

"Marc" wrote:

Reply to
RichardK

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