Payment Center is not only an invoicing solution where you send invoices to your customers and they pay you wherever they are, it can also be used in a retail environment where your customers have their credit cards on hand and are ready to swipe. Normally a POS system is used in these environments, and most of the time that’s perfect. But if you run your entire business in Salesforce (or are planning to), you probably want your transactions in the POS system to be in Salesforce as well. To do that you need to do some sort of an integration between the POS system and Salesforce. And that’s where, in these types of environments, apps in Salesforce like Payment Center can provide value. You do not need any integration because you are doing the transaction right in Salesforce.

 

To use Payment Center in a retail location, you simply plug a credit card swiper into a computer and you should be able to accept credit card payments. It’s this easy because most vendors of credit card swipers/readers have what they call the “keyboard wedge” feature where you can configure their device to act like a keyboard.

On mobile devices, such as the iPad, it’s a little bit different. Most solutions available today are comprised of the following:

  1. The hardware device itself – this is the device where you swipe the card
  2. Their own native app (or compatible apps) that processes the credit card transactions

With the above components, it’s basically a POS system running on an iPad. So the same problem exists where your credit card transactions are not in Salesforce.

To use Payment Center on an iPad, you need a solution where the device interacts with a native app that can run web applications, and can be configured in keyboard emulation mode (“keyboard wedge” feature). Here are examples of such solutions:

Note that Kulturra.com did not perform any tests on the above solutions and therefore it is strongly recommended that you do your own testing before committing to a solution.