Imagine walking into your business on a Monday morning…only to find your front window shattered, your POS system missing, and your inventory in disarray. Awful feeling, right?
Now imagine going to sleep at night, not a single worry in mind, because you know your retail business is fortified with powerful security technology. Great feeling, right?
These days, protecting your inventory and business technology isn’t as simple as locking your doors. No, these days you have to take every precaution necessary to ward off criminals – many of whom have found new ways around our modern security technology.
Ready yourself, merchant! You’re not helpless. Take stock of these best practices and make sure no one ever breaks into your retail business again.
Lock Up Your EMV Terminals/POS Systems
Alright, first things first: yes, this can be tedious, but it’s 100% necessary if you want to prevent theft. Theft threatens to disrupt your flow of business, and when your flow of business is interrupted you begin to bleed money in sales lost. That could end up costing you more than what you’ll have to shell out to replace any stolen property.
Invest in a safe, and make it protocol to lock up all your EMV terminals. Make sure you’re the only person who knows the password to the safe; remember, many of the culprits in cases of business theft are actually employees (or former employees) with access to your property.
What about immobile POS systems, like tablets that you’ve fastened to a table or computers that are too clunky to throw into a safe? ALWAYS lock your computer/tablet before you leave the building. If you can, lock each with more than one method of authentication: password, passcode, fingerprint, etc. If you really don’t want to take any chances, only give out passwords/passcodes to high-level employees you trust, and have them unlock everything in the morning before anyone else arrives.
Install Reliable Cyber Security
Threats to POS systems don’t end in the physical world. These days hackers are finding more and more ways to infiltrate business websites and databases. It’s up to you to install defense systems that will prevent these hackers from getting anywhere near your sensitive data.
How do you know your security coverage is reliable? Without computer science experience you might not be able to spot where your security falls short. That’s why we recommend having an IT expert evaluate the strength of your cyber security. They might be able to point out your system’s most vulnerable points, which you can fix before you’re ever attacked.
Quantum endorses Trustwave, the industry leader in PCI-compliant cyber security. Trustwave scans your entire security infrastructure and identifies any holes that could expose you to hackers. They’re like your 24/7 “watchdogs”; they’ll alert you whenever they detect any suspicious activity online. Of course, Trustwave offers full anti-virus protection, so there’s no need to worry about others tampering with your computers.
Click here to learn more about our end-to-end cyber security coverage.
Invest in Warranties/Insurance
You might do everything right – lock up your valuable equipment, password-lock your computers, set alarms, install cameras, implement cyber security – but even all that might not be enough to stave off a robbery. Does that mean you’re toast? Not at all!
It’s critical that you invest in warranties and insurance in the event you are robbed. Yes, it might seem like a waste of money at first, but you have to look at it from a larger perspective. What happens if that POS system you spent hundreds of dollars on is stolen? Can you REALLY afford to pay for another one AND lose customers while you wait for a replacement?
Your payment processor plays a role in this too. Some processors will charge you an arm and a leg for a terminal, and if anything were to happen to it you’d be on the hook for a second one. With Quantum, it’s different. We’ll lend you a terminal for free; even if you were to lose it, you’d just pay for a replacement – the same price you’d pay another processor just to get your hands on one at all.
It’s about time you stopped overpaying for hardware and forfeiting your money for no reason, don’t you think? We’re here to help. Click here – you send us your merchant statement, we’ll point out where you’re paying more than you should be.
