If trade shows are a prominent part of your sales strategy, it’s important to give your reps a fast and secure way to process credit card payments in the booth. Mobile card readers are one option, but the transaction data doesn’t necessarily tie back to your order entry system – which means a long, manual process after the show ends. (Let’s be real: your reps are going to prioritize following up with leads and catching up on emails. Getting transaction data over to your accounting team is going to be low on their priority list.) Or, an even worse scenario: the reps won’t even enter the order until they’re back in the office and have access to your credit card processing machine, which means the customer has to wait that much longer for their purchase.
Remote payments that integrate with your back-office systems make trade show payment processing much more straightforward.
Option One: Virtual Terminals for Processing Credit Cards in Your Tradeshow Booth
Virtual terminals let your trade show team pull up a payment page on a handheld device, enter the customer’s credit card details, and immediately send the data back to your ERP. This terminal securely sends the data to the network; authorization comes back in real time. You don’t have customers sitting around waiting in your booth, and you don’t have reps writing down credit card details on a piece of paper where they can be lost or stolen. Back at your corporate office, your fulfillment team can start working on the order as soon as it’s paid.
Option Two: 2. Skipping card verification
Online payment links are another convenient option for trade show payments. Here’s how one Curbstone customer – an international manufacturer and distributor of medical devices – is using email payment links for their outside sales team:
“When we sell at tradeshows, we didn’t want our booth staff wasting their time writing orders down on an order pad to process when they got home. To solve this, we built Curbstone’s payment links into our order entry system, giving our reps a built-in option to invoice the customer. All the rep has to do is get an email address. We email the customer the link; they enter the card details and hit submit. This sends the response back to our Salesforce, which triggers a confirmation for the customer and moves the order to fulfillment.”
If cell reception in the convention center is spotty, the customer can respond to the payment request when they get back to their hotel (or to their main office). They don’t have to register for an account or download an app; they just pull up the payment link on their device and enter/submit their payment details. This sends everything back to your order entry system or ERP as well.
Option Three: Physical Credit Card Terminals with a Direct Integration
Some physical credit card terminals can also be used in a tradeshow booth to process card payments in real time, while also passing that data back to the office once complete. Curbstone’s hardware, for instance, securely transmits data with a standard internet connection without requiring a VPN, offering merchants a third PCI-compliant option for processing card-present transactions in the field.
Discover a Faster, Easier way to Process Credit Card Payments at Tradeshows
Ready to give your trade show reps a better way to process payments in their booth? Contact us today and take a closer look at our remote credit card processing technologies.
