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Comment by johladam | Hacker News Reader

If someone from Poynt is on, what are the features that make this better than competing products? I've used Shopify for doing some PoS setups, but I'm having a hard time looking at where Poynt fits in. Other than being cheaper, it lacks some of the things that make Shopify great, namely cash handling and connecting to a back office system.

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Hi, I work for Poynt on the PoyntOS and applications. First thing first, Poynt Smart Terminal is a Secure Payment Terminal at the core that provides credit card payment processing functionality to any merchant that needs to accept payments in their stores. This is analogous to the traditional payment terminals that you might probably notice every day at a lot of merchant stores (cafes, salons, grocery stores, etc.). Poynt Smart Terminal enhances the credit card payment processing functionality by supporting more payment methods (MSR/NFC/EMV/QR Code/etc.) so the merchant doesn't need to worry about carrying multiple devices in the store and be able to serve more customers. In addition to that, Poynt Smart Terminal runs on Secure PoyntOS (powered by Android) to provide an application platform and framework for developers to build apps and solutions for the merchants and distribute through Poynt. Developers can take advantage of the PoyntOS to build unified solutions for the merchants that run on the same device where they are used to process payments (unlike various solutions today in the market that require additional hardware like ipads, dongles, etc.). Shopify is an online platform that allows developers to build solutions for their merchants hosted online or on devices. Now with Poynt Smart Terminal, developers can build PoS apps using Shopify platform that run on Poynt Smart Terminal too. So I would probably say they are complementary, not competing.

Cheers!

Congrats on the launch and new gig! You should update your HN bio ;)

Should definitely highlight (at least to the HN crowd) that this is an Android device and you're exposing some APIs that can be built on. This is really cool.

I do not work for Poynt, but it seems more like they've forked Android and created a hardware/payment platform for different POS solutions - note that they've already partnered with Vend and Intuit, and offer an SDK out of the gate.

From my prospective a competing product does not exist that fits into the targeted market. Price point, simple integration, agnostic platform... we use a blend of Vend (Brick) & Shopify (Online) and the transition to integrate something like this is simple, straightforward and cheap.

Traditional carriers like Verifone or NCR, your costs are high (typically for enterprise) and implementation is anything but straightforward.

What other payment product that is not a dongle solves these varied payment problems for hosted solutions like vend, lightspeed, shopkeep, etc and is plug and play?

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