Can You Keep Your Credit Card Terminal When Switching Consignment Software?
Samuel Dickison
Intro
We live in the golden age of consignment. But with the buffet of software choices now facing shop owners comes some inevitable friction: if the grass is green somewhere else, how painful will the transition be? In particular, can you switch software and keep your same credit card terminal?
It’s a good question. The short answer: it depends where you’re going and what you’re coming from. But if you’re switching to ConsignCloud, the answer is yes—you can use our software and bring along your existing terminal. Cue the confetti.
What Reconfiguration Means
Running a small business is hard enough without juggling new technology. That’s why we built ConsignCloud to be as accommodating as possible.
Many people assume that hardware and software are locked together. But with credit card processing you might have more flexibility than you think. Many terminals can be reconfigured to work one of two ways:
For integrated processing: payments are processed and handled by the same software running the POS
For non-integrated processing: payments are handled independently from the POS
For stores who want to keep using Gravity as their payment processor, ConsignCloud offers integrated processing. And the transition is easy; your terminal is essentially reprogrammed to talk to a different backend (Gravity takes care of this).
And for stores wanting to keep a different processor and use non-integrated processing, the transition is equally painless: you keep your processor and your terminal and ConsignCloud simply manages the rest of the system.
Either way, you’ll experience minimal disruption and the best of both worlds: payment processing of your choice alongside purpose-built consignment software.
What the Transition Looks Like
If you do plan to make the switch to ConsignCloud and you already use integrated payment processing with Gravity, it’s a straightforward process.
Talk to our onboarding team. We’ll walk you through setting up our software and how the integrated system works.
Authorize Gravity to reconfigure your terminal backend (this happens remotely).
That’s it. Start selling with your new system and same hardware.
Downtime is minimal. The transition can easily be managed in a few hours when the store is closed, and your customers won't notice any difference (besides the obvious joy on your face at how much easier it is to run your store with ConsignCloud).
Why ConsignCloud
We think (and ok, we’re biased) that ConsignCloud is the best option out there. And we built it to handle both integrated and non-integrated payment processing because we want store owners to have maximum choice when it comes to running their business.
Under this setup you can keep your old hardware and still enjoy all the features we offer—tools like in-depth sales data, inventory tracking, an intuitive POS, and so much automation you’ll be wondering how you ever got along without it.
If you’re interested in learning more or want help making the switch, we’d love to hear from you.
