BOSTON – While the attention of the vending industry has been directed towards cashless payment terminals installed in machines, the wireless technology that has made them possible is readily available to route sales businesses of all kinds, including coffee service operators and mobile caterers.

     Merchant Warehouse, a supplier of merchant terminals and services, observed that sales organizations that don’t offer their customers the convenience of payment by debit or credit card inevitably lose business in today’s market.

     Merchant Warehouse president Henry Helgeson explained that the company already deals with some mobile caterers who have seen the real benefit of enabling patrons to pay by card. “There are no ATMS on job sites,” he pointed out. The terminals best suited to this role usually are wireless models that can reside in a dock in the truck, or can be carried on the driver’s belt.

     Coffee service route sales personnel also can find that offering a cashless alternative increases volume and customer satisfaction. Especially on routes on which clients include foodservice establishments or businesses without credit histories, enabling C.O.D accounts to choose a cashless-on-delivery payment option can raise volume.

     Among terminals designed to play these roles reliably and economically are Verifone’s Nurit 8000S, featuring a large, backlit touchscreen display as well as a keyboard, and signature-capture capability; and the WAY Systems MTT 1556, with a Personal (PED)-Certified “PINPad” interface and the ability optionally to support additional functions, including cash receipts, invoice number, and Card Verification Value entry.

     Merchant Warehouse was founded in 1998 to bring a variety of credit-card machines and merchant accounts to businesses at a reasonable price, with strong service support. This proved to be an idea whose time had come, and the company today has a staff of 110 serving more than 50,000 merchants. It operates a division devoted to wireless terminal sales and support.

     Helgeson observed that the card-issuing organizations are working diligently toward universal acceptance of their products, and regard their “competition” as cash and checks. Thus, everyone in their distribution systems is striving to encourage the widest possible application of today’s technology.

     Wireless card terminals for such mobile applications and taxicabs have been under test, and underground limited deployment for more than a decade. During that time, wireless services have improved greatly in quantity and in coverage, and the technology has become much more reliable and affordable. The exchange of data involved in a cashless transaction requires very little bandwidth, and could be handled adequately by such obsolete and obsolescent technologies as cellular digital packet data (CDPD) and ARDIS (Motient). Today’s extensive, resilient and fast wireless services lend themselves readily to applications in which landlines or hardwired networks are not available, from concession stands in sports arenas to route service vehicles and mobile food, beverage, and ice cream trucks.

     Because of the payment card industry’s drive to make its services universally available to consumers, Helgeson noted, the vending industry is extremely interesting to the card-issuing organizations. To date, he said the industry has defined 162 “interchange categories” covering a wide variety of merchants. Vending operations are not among them, but it seems no unlikely that the vending industry will be made a category in the foreseeable future.

Information on Merchant Warehouse, the account services it offers and the lines it represents can be found at its website, merchantwarehouse.com or by calling (800)941-6557.