No Messy Transaction Cancellations Mean You Make What You Sell
In the past, it was possible for credit card transactions to be made on site only for the account to turn out to be maxed out or overdrawn. The result: you get stiffed and the customer walks away with a tray of beers. Whether that action was conscious or not, the loss is yours. Intellipay prevents losses and ensures all vendors are paid what they’re owed.
“An appropriate balance has to be in the patron’s account otherwise the selection of products on the POS cannot even be completed,” said Chris. “Therefore a vendor cannot lose a payment or amount as long as they follow the double tap purchase guidelines; one tap to open a transaction, a second tap to close it.”
“Closing that transaction,” he continues, “means the funds moved from the patron’s account to the account of the vendor within the Intellipay environment. That vendor account sits in trust within Intellipay, growing fatter and fatter the longer the event continues, ready to be reconciled with real world dollars sitting in an acquiring merchant bank account.”
Intellipay Puts the Vendor and Event on Even Playing Field
With RFID cashless payments, festivals and vendors will often find discrepancies in the reporting and post-festival payout. Intellitix and its Intellipay technology is the great equalizer for this problem, giving greater transparency to sales figures.
“Both parties are looking at the same sales report,” explains Chris. “There is no more ‘I owe you’ or ‘you owe me’, and no more of the ‘Well, I only made X amount so I can only give you Y amount’. Intellipay (cashless payments) is the mediator at the table, guaranteeing 100% accuracy in reporting, visible to both parties through the backend reporting dashboard.”
Since there are no cash sales, no credit card transactions, and no clunky token systems, nothing falls through the cracks and both the vendor and the event organizers can be clear and frank about what was made and what is owed.
Theft No Longer Becomes an Issue
This is a difficult subject to discuss, because most vendors out there would like to think that their staff and customers are exclusively good, hardworking people brimming with honesty and integrity. For 99.9% of people that might be the case, but they say that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and if that bad apple makes off with your take for the entire weekend, that could have grave consequences for the vendor’s business. But the same goes for the patrons too. Theft can affect everyone, but Intellitix’s cashless system is your safeguard.
“Vendors are often having to rely on temporary staff to come in and assist on a contract basis to help fulfill the demand for staffing at their festival,” explains Chris. “Vendors should be focused on training these staff and upholding the level of service standards their regular customers come to expect, not focusing their time on determining who can be trusted to count the cash and process the daily sales report or reconciliation. With cashless there is no risk or even temptation for staff to have sticky fingers.”
You Get That Precious Sales Data Too
It’s very important to remember that cashless payment creates a huge pool of data that’s being gathered on the customers and how they are responding to your stock and offerings. And while the festival has commissioned this platform, the vendor are also allowed access which gives them tremendous insight into who’s buying what. “The analytics on the vendor’s festival performance are available should they wish to dive in-depth and understand their operation a little better,” Chris explains. “We can highlight peak transaction times over the course of the festival, peak transaction times per day, and there are some cases where demographic information is available to understand; for example, the 18-25 crowd may prefer cider over beer, or males may have purchased 20% more hard alcohol than a female.”
Knowing this will not only allow you make adjustments over the course of the weekend but will give you the opportunity to hone your operation outside of the festival too.
The advantages of cashless far outweigh traditional methods of payment, and we obviously have a lot of material available on this should you like to learn more. But the above points often fall through the cracks. Vendors are often pushed into cashless without being able to make that decision for themselves, and it’s important to give them complete peace of mind when using this exciting new technology.
To learn more, watch our video on RFID cashless payments for events:
