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Top Mobile Restaurant POS Systems of 2019

Restaurant POS System

A point-of-sale system is an important factor in a restaurant’s success for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s the system that facilitates all electronic payments, and in a world where plastic is king, a flawlessly operating POS is a must.

On top of that, paying the bill is often the last step of a customers’ dining experience, and any hiccups could be the difference between a great review and a customer walking away with a bad taste in their mouth (no pun intended).

It’s clear why no restaurant can afford to do without an effective, reliable POS. Luckily, BAMS integrates with 24 of the most popular point-of-sale systems on the market today, including the following four merchant-favorite mobile systems.

 

Lavu

Lavu’s is a highly flexible iPad-based point-of-sale system that has become the leading mobile POS for bars and restaurants. It offers a full suite of mobile payment options, including contactless payments and traditional swipe or chip card payments via integrations with hardware like Square. Lavu also integrates with PayPal’s EMV-compliant chip card reader for merchants processing their payments through PayPal. In addition to their iPad-based POS, the company also offers self-serve kiosks to help streamline the guest ordering experience.

Lavu’s system offers an entire suite of features to aide front and back-of-house staff, including menu customization, automatic tab authorization, pre-selectable happy hour settings, inventory tracking and control, advanced reporting, and much more. The system offers an open API so that restaurants can customize and configure their implementations based on their evolving needs.

 

Lightspeed Restaurant

Lightspeed offers the same tableside ordering and mobile-POS benefits as most of its competitors along with some unique features that make it an attractive solution. One of those features is Lightspeed Accounting, an integration that allows the POS to be synched with a restaurant’s accounting software to automate parts of the bookkeeping process, automatically sync data, and offer advanced reporting to managers.

Lightspeed comes with a no-cost EMV-compliant terminal which, while a bit bulkier than some other options, allows servers to process card payments directly at table-side without having to walk away with a customer’s card.

 

Clover

Clover is a cloud-based mobile POS company that offers point-of-sale systems built on Android. Unlike Lavu and Lightspeed, Clover only offers proprietary hardware, and their system can’t be loaded onto an existing tablet. With that being said, the products Clover offer are innovative, and their line covers a wide-array of customer needs.

The Clover Flex is a small handheld POS with a touchscreen built-in, perfect for tableside ordering and payments. Their Clover Mini is a more traditional mobile POS that offers a wider feature set useful to restaurants including configurable floor plans, tab pre-authorization and more. Both are EVM-compliant and can accept swipe, chip, or contactless payment. At $499 US and $599 US respectively, they’re also very affordable POS systems.

 

ShopKeep

ShopKeep is another iPad based mobile POS popular with bars and restaurants, processing over 289 million transactions per year. Their POS can be integrated with card readers like Square, but ShopKeep also offers a complete hardware kit providing all the components a restaurant needs to accept payments, including an iPad enclosure, cash drawer, EMV-compliant card reader, receipt and kitchen printers, and more.

Their POS software offers fully-featured front and back of house management, advanced analytics, tableside ordering capability, staff management, accounting integration, online ordering, and many more of the features restaurateurs expect from a mobile POS.

In addition to these four popular mobile POS systems, BAMS also integrates with 21 more of the industry’s best mobile and fixed point-of-sale solutions. Whichever system your restaurant chooses, we’re ready to help get you up, running, and accepting electronic payments with the minimum hassle possible. Contact us today to request a quote or find out more about how BAMS can help your restaurant take the headache out of electronic payments.

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Authorize.Net Direct Post Security Upgrade: Updating MD5 to SHA-512

Authorize.Net Direct Post Security Upgrade

Authorize.Net – the most popular payment gateway service provider in the world – is in the process of making a big change to how it verifies transactions, and that change impacts the business of every single one of their Direct Post users.

The company is phasing out MD5-based hashing and switching to SHA-512 signature key hashing. The last stage of the switch goes into effect on June 27th, 2019, and every business using Authorize.Net Direct Post, including BAMS users, will have to switch over before that date to avoid interruptions to their payment processing services.

To a lot of merchants, this might be a confusing topic or seem like an unnecessary hassle, but this change is an important step in keeping Authorize.Net’s transaction security on the cutting edge – something that benefits every single merchant on the platform.

 

What are MD5 and SHA-512?

MD5 and SHA-512 are cryptographic hash functions – algorithms that take data of any size and transmit them into an essentially irreversible fixed-length string. In simpler terms, hash functions take any type of data – like your name or your credit card number – and turn it into a new set of letters and numbers with a fixed number of characters.

Once that new set of letters and numbers has been created, it’s mathematically so difficult to translate it back into the original data that it simply isn’t feasible. That means that users who know the translation between the original data and the hash can easily verify it, but outside parties – like hackers or other bad actors – can’t decrypt the hash to get at the sensitive information it protects.

That level of security is why credit card companies and payment processors use cryptographic hashing to protect transaction data. A buyer’s complete information can be hashed and transmitted without having to worry about it being intercepted and seen by anyone that isn’t supposed to.

 

Why is switching from MD5 to SHA-512 worth the trouble?

Internet security is a never-ending game of cat and mouse. Hackers and bad guys are constantly figuring out new ways to break existing security protocols, and security teams are constantly figuring out new safeguards to replace the old ones.

MD5 is old technology. It was designed in 1991, and while it’s been a security workhorse for decades, it’s so old and so common that it no longer meets the level of security required to protect transaction data. MD5 has a number of weak points, not the least of which are that hackers have developed brute force attacks that can decrypt its hashes, and that it’s possible to duplicate the same hashes with different data.

SHA-512 is one of the newest hash functions in the SHA-2 family, and it has some major security benefits over MD5. The first is that, while MD5 is a 128-bit hash function, SHA-512 creates 512-bit hashes. In practical terms, what that means is that the strings of letters and numbers created by SHA-512 are 2.75x larger than the ones created by MD5 (trust us on the math.) The second major benefit is that SHA-512 is collision resistant, meaning it’s much, much harder to create the same hash from two different sets of data.

The result is that SHA-512 encryption is much harder to crack than MD5, and when it comes to the sensitive payment data of your customers, that advantage is priceless.

 

What do I have to do to make sure my Authorize.Net integration is up to date?

Your two basic options are to upgrade Authorize.Net to version 2.3.1, or to apply a patch to your implementation of version 2.2.8. In either case, you’ll also need to obtain a signature key for your newly updated security.

Patching an existing Authorize.Net integration isn’t overly complex, but it might be beneficial to obtain some developer help to get the job done. 

Completing the necessary steps before June 27th, 2019 will ensure your uninterrupted ability to continue processing payments through Authorize.Net and will ensure your customers will be able to continue doing business with you with full confidence in the security of their sensitive data.  

 

Check out our Authorize.net Certified Integrations and learn more about BAMS. Our low-price guarantee and unique five-point price comparison process ensure that partnering with BAMS will not only make your payment processing easier, it’ll also help boost your company’s profitability as well.