Appearance
Card Readers
Card readers take card payments in person — at the office desk when somebody comes in to pay a balance, or at the gate during the fair.
Payments taken this way are recorded as card present, which is a different — and cheaper — processing category than a card number typed into a form.
What you need
- A working Stripe connection for the side you are taking money on
- Stripe Terminal hardware
Locations and readers
Terminal hardware is organized as locations — a physical place — with readers registered to them.
Register your locations first, then add each reader to the location it lives at. A fair might have the office as one location and the main gate as another.
Taking a payment
From an invoice, choose to charge a card reader, pick the reader, and the amount goes to it. The customer taps or inserts, and the payment is recorded against the invoice as card_present.
At the gate, reader sales land in the same ticketing dashboard as online sales.
Supported hardware
Stripe Terminal readers — the WisePOS E and S710 are the common choices for a desk or a gate.
Buy readers through Stripe so they register cleanly.
Practical advice
Name readers after where they are, not their model. "Main Gate" beats "WisePOS E #2" when somebody is picking one on a busy Saturday.
Test each reader before the fair, not on opening morning. A reader that has not been used since last August is a reader that wants a firmware update.