Technology Products

Boomtown Reviews: The Clover Station POS

The Clover Station

For the inaugural post we’ll be reviewing the Clover Station by First Data. This powerful and sleek cloud-based POS system, originally developed by Clover in 2012, was quickly acquired by First Data in the same year. Clover was shipped to Merchants in January of 2014 and is now available from over 3,000 major banks across the US, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank.

The Clover Station is aesthetically pleasing, functional and easy to set up, which makes it popular to merchants of all sizes. It boasts a hi-resolution 11.6” touchscreen terminal with an integrated card reader, as well as a side-facing camera that acts as a barcode scanner. Clover also has a multitude of add-on peripherals like secure cash drawers, kitchen printers and scales that are easily connected to one of the terminals integrated USB ports. By purchasing First Data’s FD40 pin-pad, the Clover Station can quickly become EMV compliant and accept NFC (near-field communication) payments like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, as well as complete chip-and-pin and chip-and-signature payments.The Clover Station can be purchased directly through various banks or online, and can sometimes cost upwards of $1,000. Clover also offers competitive processing rates as low at 1.39% and as high as 2.5% depending on the provider. Non-swiped cards or card-not-present transactions add an additional 1.1% to the processing fee.

Highlights

One of the major draws to the Clover station is its simple set-up process. Each Clover terminal comes pre-configured and ready to process transactions. Just plug-in the power supply and begin accepting transactions – however, merchants may want to wait until their menu is built! The Clover Station also generates powerful reports and makes tracking inventory, sales and employees a breeze. With every sale, the Clover Station automatically tracks inventory and builds transaction records that are easy to access and analyze.The Clover Station also comes with a robust app marketplace where merchants can download free and paid apps to help run their business more efficiently. The apps in the marketplace range from tools that quickly sync sales to merchant accounting software, to fun apps that add a personal message or fortunes to customers’ receipts. The Clover station also has various loyalty options that allow merchants to quickly start a loyalty program to reward their most active customers.

Who it Works Best For

The Clover Station has been found to work best for quick-serve restaurants as well as retailers. With additional apps, full service restaurants can easily assign tables to servers and manage table orders. It can manage more complex menus and makes customizing orders very painless. Retailers will find the Clover Station is excellent at managing inventory and adding/editing products. Using Clover’s inventory app, retailers can quickly modify, label and categorize multiple items.

Boomtown and Clover

Boomtown has partnered with Clover to develop an app specifically for Clover merchants. The Boomtown app allows merchants to easily monitor their entire business network 24 hours-a-day directly from the Clover Station. It also pairs directly with the iOS and Android apps so Clover merchants can monitor their business on-the-go and receive fast and reliable remote support when anything goes wrong. Learn more about the Boomtown app in the Clover Marketplace at www.clovertechsupport.com or leave us a comment!

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