Peer-To-Peer: VAR Gives Advice For Selling Tablet POS
Business Solutions magazine recently interviewed Steve Raymond, director of sales at POS Terminal 2000, for the article “2 Quick Fixes To Stagnating POS Sales.” In addition to giving details about how his company sold new IT solutions to its existing hospitality clients, Raymond answered some questions about Tablet POS.
BSM: Are tablets a threat or opportunity to your business? Why?
Raymond: Tablets represent a great opportunity for our business because they are very complementary to the traditional POS terminals we sell to our hospitality customers. In Quebec, all restaurants are required by law to have a special appliance hardwired between the POS terminal and printer to ensure all taxes are captured properly. What this means is that you’ll never see only a mobile POS solution in a Canadian restaurant in our area.
BSM: What kind of tablet solutions are you selling (hardware and software)?
Raymond: We use the Motorola ET1, which is a rugged, 7-inch Android tablet, and we run Maitre’D software on the devices.
BSM: What kind of money can you make by selling these types of solutions?
Raymond: In the last six months, tablet sales have made up 50 percent of our revenue.
BSM: Have you had to replace tablets because a restaurant dove into tablets too quickly and didn't get what they expected?
Raymond: We were the first retail VARs in our area to start selling mobile POS solutions. About six months after we started, some of our competitors started selling mobile solutions, too. Even though mobility looks so simple and intuitive, there are a lot of things that can go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, causing the screen to freeze in the middle of taking a customer’s order. We’ve had to resolve a few botched installs from some of our competitors, but we haven’t run into any issues with our mobile solution because uses rugged tablets and mobile POS software.