Dial-up - Canada Credit Card Machines

Dial-up Credit Card Machine

Dial-up credit card machines the most widely used (POS) Point of Sale Terminal in retail locations. Mostly due to it being the most cost effective unit available to merchants. Typically new Dial-up machines can do a transaction in about 10-15 seconds and some of the older units can take as long as 20-25 seconds. This is usually fine for most small businesses, but those businesses that have multiple check-out stations or operate on volume and have a regular line-up at their check-out stations will want to seriously consider using an IP credit card machine.

Dial-up credit card machines will work on any working phone line, however if you choose to run the credit card machine off your existing business phone line you will quickly discover that you can not be on the phone at the same time as you are doing a transaction on your point of sale terminal. If you do a transaction at the same time as speaking on the same phone line, you with get a error message saying "no host" which means it could not find the phone line because you were on it. Dial-up units do work with any working phone line, but they require there to be an available dial tone.

This also means, if you have voice mail you will have to make sure that there are not any messages, otherwise you may have to clear them or when setting up your voice message service to select the "turn notification off" so it doesn't give you the "beep, beep, beep" tone when someone has left you message.

This is really not an issue for most small business owners because they are not busy enough to work around these dis-advantages with a dial-up POS unit. Some merchants decide to share their credit card machine with their fax line or have a secondary roll over line or even pay for a dedicated line to not have to be concerned with whether they have a available open phone line.

If you are a new business and want a dedicated line, then is might be better to not pay for an existing phone line and invest in an IP credit card machine instead (especially if your business intends on having high-speed internet available anyways). However, if you are looking for the lowest cost debit machine option then you will want to roll with a Dial-up unit.