You likely know that Farmbrite offers an online store for your customers to shop, and that you can manually create administrative orders for those that you take over the phone or through other direct communication. Beyond that, you'll also have a Point of Sale system to process in-person sales, such as at your farm stand or at a farmers market. This works very similar to your online shop, but with some additional features to streamline the sales process.
- You can bypass the required customer information like name and email to more quickly process the order, or you can select a customer record from a dropdown menu to associate the order with an existing contact.
- Your customers can pay by scanning a QR code with their mobile phone. This QR code will be displayed on your POS device, allowing them to scan it and then process the payment on their phone without supplying a physical form of payment.
- You canoptionally process payments via a payment terminal that allows your customers to swipe or tap their card rather than typing the full number and expiration date.
- You can still process cash, check, and invoice payments via the POS platform as well.
To launch the Point of Sale (POS) system, navigate to Settings in the Market, and choose Online Sales. You'll see a button for Point of Sale there. Click it, and the POS will open in a new tab.
Creating Orders
The POS interface might be somewhat familiar to you, as it looks similar to the online store. Your products are displayed here, and you can add them to your cart to build the order. You can use the categories on the left as a shortcut, or scroll through your products to add them from the main display. You can add them to the cart directly, or click on them to see additional details about the item if you customer has questions.
In our example below, we start by adding a bottle of hot sauce, and then a few pounds of broccoli. Notice that the amount purchased can be updated in the cart. We also sell a bison filet, inputting the exact weight of the steak to charge our customer appropriately. Once we have added all of the items to the cart, we can continue to checkout.
Checkout and Payment Options
You'll see the total amount due calculated in the Order Summary section on the right, and your default tax rate applied if you have one set up. Click Edit if you need to change anything in the cart.
At this point you'll decide whether you'd like to collect customer information. You'll see a menu to select an existing contact/customer that you have previously stored in Farmbrite. Making this selection will associate this order with their record, and adds to their total for your Top Customers report as well.
You can always add a new contact here by supplying any of the information. None of the fields are required. If it's not too busy you might ask for an email address or phone number for your mailing list, or skip the fields and move on to your next customer more efficiently. Special instructions can be added as well, which are recorded on the order, and shared with your customer in their invoice if you associate their contact/email with the order.
You'll then select a payment method for the order, and choose Complete Payment once you have made the selection.
- Cash and check payments are fairly straightforward; if you take these you'll manually take the payment outside of Farmbrite and the order will be completed and marked as paid.
- Invoicing is also available. If you are using the POS at your farm store and give your customers terms to pay in the future, you can select "Invoice Me" to complete the order without accepting immediate payment. The order will be marked as Due, and you'll need to follow up with your customer to collect payment.
- Credit Card processing is also an option. You'll need to first have Stripe credit card processing set up and connected for this. There are two options for online payment processing:
- We think the easiest way to process a card payment is via QR code. This will display a QR code on your device, which your customer can scan to pay on their own device! They'll scan the code with their phone's camera to bring up a payment portal. They can select from their digital wallets and stored payment methods to easily supply their payment information and complete the transaction.
- Alternatively, you can purchase and connect a credit card reader to your device, allowing for card present transactions to tap or swipe a physical card. You'll find more about this in a section of this article further below.
In the example below, we're using the QR code system to pay for our order. After selecting the customer and choosing Complete Order, our customer can scan the QR code displayed on the POS and then pay the amount with their stored payment method on their device. Your POS refreshes when the payment is successfully processed and you can then start your next order.
Reviewing Your Order in Farmbrite
After finalizing the order, you'll see it added to your Farmbrite orders page. It will be automatically marked as paid and completed, unless you have chosen the Invoice option. Your payments will automatically be recorded as income transactions in the Accounting section as well. In our example below, we also see the connection to Stripe for the credit card transaction.
Optionally Configuring A Card Payment Terminal
Do you want to take card present credit card transactions? We think the QR code method outlined above gives your customers an easy experience, but also realize that some customers may want to swipe or tap a card instead. If you would like to offer this, you can purchase and connect a card processing terminal for Stripe Payments.
Farmbrite's POS works with the BBPOS WisePOS E offered by Stripe. This is a stand alone card reader that can process chip cards, magnetic swipe cards, and contactless digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay. You can order this terminal from the Stripe site, and connect it to your Stripe account. This requires a few steps:
- Set up a location for your reader - A location is a physical place the reader operates, generally your business address/location.
- Add the Reader to your location - This connects the reader to be used at this location and associates it to your Stripe account.
- Register the Reader - This final step prepares your new reader to take payments by registering it with Stripe.
After completing these steps, the reader will be available to select when launching the POS. You can still bypass the reader if you don't need it for these sales; maybe you are using the POS at your farmers market and not your store and want to simplify with just the QR codes in this different situation.
After you select Credit Card as the payment type, Farmbrite sends a request for the transaction to Stripe. Stripe then contacts the selected reader for the request. You'll swipe or tap the card, or have your customer hold their phone to it to use their tap to pay digital wallet. If the transaction succeeds the order is complete, if it declines you can retry with a different payment card.
Reach out to us if you have any questions about using the point of sale!